Mayakovsky's satire

Vladimir Mayakovsky is an excellent satirist. He brilliantly summarized and developed the traditions of N.V. Gogol and M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin in new historical conditions. Having emerged in modern times, Mayakovsky's satire is fundamentally different from the satire of its predecessors in its propaganda orientation and revolutionary optimism. Mayakovsky was born as a satirist long before the October Revolution. The first satirical works were written in 1912. These are the poems “Nate” and “To You,” included in the collection “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” Already in his first works, the poet unleashed the full force of his angry laughter on specific carriers of evil, on enemies of the people, on speculators, on those who profit from war.

Mayakovsky's satire reaches its greatest sharpness during the years of the revolution. When the Cadets tried to deceive the masses with liberal chatter, Mayakovsky created “The Tale of Little Red Riding Hood”, in which he says:

Once upon a time there was a cadet.

The cadet was wearing a red cap.

In addition to this cap, which went to the cadet,

There wasn't and isn't a damn thing red in it.

Mayakovsky's satire sounded with particular force in the years civil war. Working in “Windows of ROSTA”, Mayakovsky, with the pen of a poet and the brush of an artist, exposed the imperialist invaders, revealed their aggressive policies, showed the betrayal of the Socialist Revolutionaries, ridiculed cowards and deserters, quitters and malingerers on the front of struggle and labor. This is “Song of the Ryazan peasant”, and “The story about bagels and about a woman who does not recognize the republic”, and “Red Hedgehog”, which contains the following lines:

You can't take us with your bare hand,

Comrades, everyone is under arms!

Red Army – Red Hedgehog –

The iron strength of the community...

The poet's satirical talent was revealed in poems about foreign countries. Having visited America and seen the “American paradise” with its “democracy” and “civilization”, inhuman exploitation and racial discrimination, Mayakovsky writes a number of poems about America: “Black and White” “Skyscraper in Section”, “Decent Citizen”, “ Brooklyn Bridge" and others. Having looked at the American way of life, Mayakovsky comes to the conclusion that technical progress under capitalism it serves the rich that America suffers from political backwardness. In the poem "A Good Citizen" he writes:

If your eye

Doesn't see the enemy

They drank your ardor

NEP and trade

Lost the habit of hating -

Come

To New York.

Mayakovsky challenges America and the Americans who built their prosperity on the dollar.

This is how he writes about it in the poem “Challenge”:

Ripping off

speaks,

Putting purple on Broadway,

Capital –

His obscenity.

In the 20s, Mayakovsky created a whole series of works directed against sycophants, the negative phenomena of life during the NEP, and bureaucrats.

In 1922, the poet wrote the poem “The Sitting Ones.” All the power of the poem’s anger is directed against bureaucracy, against those who, in the bustle of the meeting, saw the style of working with people. Mayakovsky openly declares his negative attitude towards bureaucracy:

I meet the early dawn with a dream:

"Oh, at least

One meeting

Regarding the eradication of all meetings!

Mayakovsky tirelessly called for a fight against philistinism, the remnants of philistinism. The poet wrote: “The rubbish has thinned out a little so far. There’s a lot to do—you just have to keep up.” In April 1921, along with the poem “The Last Page of the Civil War,” the poem “About Rubbish” was written. These two poems are closely related and at the same time opposite in general tone. The first line of the poem “About Rubbish”: “Glory, Glory, Glory to the heroes!!!” echoes the last line of the poem “The Last Page of the Civil War”:

Forever and ever, comrades,

Glory, glory, glory!

By this, Mayakovsky emphasizes that having glorified the heroes who won for the people “the great right to work,” it is necessary to immediately call on the Soviet people to resist the philistinism, so that “communism is not beaten by the canaries!” The entire poem is directed against the philistine way of life and philistine psychology:

The storms of the revolutionary bosom have calmed down.

The Soviet mess turned into mud.

And it came out

From behind the RSFSR

Philistine.

They were the ones who “built cozy offices and bedrooms” and discussed how best to show up at a ball in the Revolutionary Military Council and what emblems to sew a dress with:

And me with dress emblems.

Without a hammer and sickle you will not appear in the world!

IN last years Throughout his life, the poet creates not only satirical poems, but also satirical plays. In the plays “The Bedbug” and “Bathhouse” Mayakovsky continues the fight against bureaucracy, servility, political ignorance, rudeness and drunkenness. Mayakovsky himself wrote about the play “The Bedbug”: “The Bedbug” is a theatrical variation of the main theme on which I wrote poems, poems, painted posters and propaganda. This is the theme of the fight against the bourgeoisie.” Such a tradesman appears in the play as the “former worker” Prisypkin, who took for himself a “beautiful” name - Pierre Skripkin. He is a degenerate, in no way reminiscent of a Soviet worker. The desire for philistine well-being takes over in him: “Why did I fight? I am for good life struggled. Here she is at my fingertips: a wife, a home, and real life... Those who fought have the right to rest by a quiet river. In! Maybe I’m elevating my entire class with my improvement. In!" In the second part of the play, Mayakovsky takes the viewer “ten five-year plans ahead.” People of the communist future “revived” Prisypkin and, with a feeling of disgust, place him in a cage in a zoological garden, attaching to it the inscription “philistines vulgaris.” In the image of Prisypkin, according to the playwright, the facts of “philistine scum of both the century and today are satirically summarized.”

Another play by Mayakovsky, “Bath,” with its ideological content, its pathos and imagery, is associated with the atmosphere of labor enthusiasm, the development of self-criticism, and the struggle for the purity of the party ranks, characteristic of the first Five-Year Plan. “Chief Manager for Coordination Management (Glavnachpups)” Pobedonosikov and his secretary Optimistenko put all sorts of obstacles to worker-inventors. "It's possible. Linking and coordinating is possible. Every issue can be linked and agreed upon,” they repeat this bureaucratic phrase in different ways, causing enormous harm to the living cause. But from the communist future comes a messenger who takes with her everyone who spares no effort to build communism in the Soviet country. Pobedonosikov and Optimistenko were discarded as unnecessary garbage.

The true heroes of the first five-year plan appear before us in the images of Chudakov, Velosipedkin, Underton, Nochkin and others. The most striking positive characters of the play are Chudakov and Velosipedkin - the instigators of the struggle for socialism. They are bound by bonds of friendship, common goal which became their passion. They are characterized by the scope of creative thought, a sober outlook on life, which never turns into narrow practicality. Chudakov is a man of daring imagination, based on the idea of ​​the real good of humanity. Velosipedkin is not one of those who would like to get into communism at all costs - he is a selfless builder of a new society, and the main feature of his character is perhaps most clearly revealed in his request to the Phosphoric woman not to take him and his comrades into a bright future before The five-year plan will be completed.

With all his creativity, Mayakovsky was directed towards the future. His combat weapon is a pen, and with his creativity the poet awakened bright feelings in a person, helped to fight what prevented him from living. Mayakovsky expressed his poetic credo in the poem “An extraordinary adventure that happened to Vladimir Mayakovsky in the summer at the dacha”:

Always shine

Shine everywhere

Until the last days of the bottom,

Shine –

And no nails!

This is my slogan -

And the sun!

These lines entered the consciousness of millions of people as an epigraph to the entire work of Mayakovsky. The legacy of a great writer lives on through generations, lives and changes, grows, and is comprehended in a new way, turning first one way or the other. Mayakovsky gave the people the “ringing power of the poet,” and we highly honor his memory. On the square named after him in Moscow there is a majestic monument to the poet. Mayakovsky stands thoughtfully on the pedestal and it seems that he is not made of bronze, but alive. And this monument always, at any time of the year, has fresh flowers, which is the best recognition of the people’s nationwide love for the great poet.

Composition

In the work of V.V. Mayakovsky, satire occupies an extremely important place. Speaking about the main function of his poetry, we must not forget that the new was established in a sharp and irreconcilable struggle with the old. The poet has been fighting the enemies of socialism since he realized that he was part of it, choosing satire as a weapon of struggle. In the pre-revolutionary years, he mainly denounced the old order and ideology, in the post-October years he actively defended the new system.

Discussing the features that define satire, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: “In order for satire to be truly satire and achieve its goal, it is necessary, firstly, that it make the reader feel the ideal from which its creator and , secondly, so that she is quite clearly aware of the object against which her sting is directed.” Mayakovsky's satire fully satisfies these requirements: in it one can always feel the social ideal for which the poet is fighting, and the evil against which its edge is directed is clearly defined.

Largest quantity satirical works Mayakovsky wrote after the October Revolution. Their themes are varied and determined by two central tasks - depicting the social contradictions of the bourgeois world (poems written under the influence of the poet’s trips abroad are devoted to this) and denouncing philistinism and bureaucracy.

The first direction in the writer’s satire can be illustrated by the poem “Black and White,” written during the poet’s short stay in the capital of Cuba, Havana. It is dedicated to the topic of racial discrimination. This is already emphasized in the title of the poem, which translated from English means “Black and White.” The hero of the poem, a simple black worker Willie, sweeping the Havana streets near the American tobacco company Henry Clay and Bock, Limited, reveals the sad fate of millions of American blacks doomed to poverty and lawlessness. The poet clearly characterizes the principle that determines the relations of people in the “paradise country”: “... the whites have dollars, the blacks do not.”

This principle explains the image of the main character - a victim of capitalism and racism. Before us is a dark, downtrodden man. But this is not Willie’s fault, but his misfortune, the result of the social, economic, and cultural conditions in which he lives. This man cannot even imagine rebelling against white oppressors. Therefore, he does not react in any way to Mr. Breg's blow after trying to express his opinion about the division of labor between whites and blacks.

These social contradictions become the object of exposure in Mayakovsky. In contrast to them, at the end of the poem he brings out the image of Moscow as the center of the world communist movement, the city where the headquarters of the Communist International was located in those years. For the poet, the Comintern in Moscow is the ideal place where all the “humiliated and insulted” can turn with full confidence that they will be helped. And although the poet realizes that people like Willie are far from understanding the ways to fight for their rights, he still considers it necessary to push them to action with his instructions.

The second satirical direction of Mayakovsky’s poetry is clearly expressed in the poems “About Rubbish” and “Sitting Around”. These two poems first voiced the theme of denouncing philistinism and bureaucracy. In the first of them, the poet depicts two representatives of the “modernized”: a bourgeois employee who has “built” himself a “cozy office” in one of the Soviet institutions, and his wife, “Comrade Nadya.” Mayakovsky showed two of the most characteristic features of the new philistinism. On the one hand, the dreams of ordinary people do not go beyond personal enrichment, and on the other, the tradesman, while remaining an owner, strives to create the appearance of a person in modern Soviet society. The finale of the poem is filled with the poet’s “menacing laughter,” branding philistinism through the lips of the revived K. Marx: “... Quickly turn the heads of the canaries so that communism is not beaten by the canaries!”

In the poem “The Seated,” the poet exposes the bench bustle of bureaucrats who are simply torn between all kinds of meetings, but in fact do nothing useful. At the end, Mayakovsky calls for another meeting “regarding the eradication of all meetings.”

Mayakovsky's satire is also diverse in terms of genre. In the pre-revolutionary period, it was represented by the so-called “hymns”, denouncing the existing system. After October 1917, the poet developed a new genre - the poetic satirical feuilleton, with its inherent sharpness of images and some of their individualization. Most of the poems of the 20s were written in this genre. The poems of the foreign cycle are a lyric-epic narrative, which is based on an episode from real life. The works of the playwright Mayakovsky, such as his plays such as “Bathhouse” and “The Bedbug”, also acquire a satirical sound.

There is no doubt that Mayakovsky’s satire also stands out for its artistic originality. The poet's favorite technique for depicting objects of sarcasm and jokes is the grotesque, based on the extreme hyperbolization of images. In the poem “The Satisfied”, the grotesque picture of a meeting of “people of halves” not only evokes cheerful laughter, but also emphasizes the reality - the infinity of stupid meetings. Grotesqueness is manifested both in the thirty-meter-long tongue of a suck-up, who “licks the hand” of his superiors (the poem “The Suck-Up”), and in the meter-long ear of a coward (the poem “Coward”), which catches all the remarks of the authorities, etc.

Thus, we can conclude that Mayakovsky’s satire is very unique in thematic, artistic and genre terms. Moreover, the communist party spirit with which it is permeated, its frank journalisticism and agitation, combined with the life-like authenticity and significance of the problems posed in it, determine the innovative nature of the entire satirical work of the poet.

We call everyone

to the forehead,

and not backing away,

rubbish mowed...

V. Mayakovsky

One of the most striking aspects of Mayakovsky's poetic creativity was satire, of which he was rightfully considered a brilliant master. High, exciting pathos and soulful lyricism coexisted in him with satirical mercilessness, with Shchedrin's, Swift's mocking laughter. The higher and purer the poet pictured the shining ideal of the new man, the more furiously he attacked vulgarity, lack of culture, greed and predation. “What an evil, strong, “biting” enemy our philistinism, bureaucracy, degenerate sycophancy found in Mayakovsky! What magnificent thunder and lightning Mayakovsky brought down on spiritual callousness, ideological sclerosis, the mud and slush of lazy thought, “mental” lying on the stove, rendering way of life and morals, bureaucracy of big and small bureaucrats and squabbles!” - wrote N.I. Bukharin in a farewell article with the subtitle “Sorrowful Thoughts” on the eve of the funeral of the great poet.

“Terrible laughter” was what Mayakovsky called his angry satirical poems, since with them he helped burn “various rubbish and nonsense” out of our lives. The poet considered it his duty to “roar like a copper-throated siren in the fog of the philistine, near the boiling storms.” The poet saw in rhyme not only “a caress and a slogan” for friends, but also “a bayonet and a whip” for enemies. With sharp words he struck down lazy people, bureaucrats, plunderers of people's property and other “scoundrels.” The objects of Mayakovsky's satire are as diverse as reality itself. His satirical whip got at the enemy, under whatever guise he appeared: an interventionist or a killer from around the corner, a careerist sycophant or a Soviet “pompadour” with a party card. Back in 1921, in the poem “On Rubbish,” Mayakovsky boldly depicted the mug of a tradesman poking out “from behind the back of the RSFSR.” His “comrade Nadya” is inimitable:

And me with dress emblems.

Without a hammer and sickle you will not appear in the world!

I'll be featured

at a ball in the Revolutionary Military Council?!

Mayakovsky, like Gorky, hated philistinism, ridiculed and exposed it everywhere: in large and small things, in everyday life and art, among some of the youth of his day. These are his poems “Love”, “You Give an Elegant Life”, “Letter to My Beloved Molchanov”, “Beer and Socialism”, “Marusya Poisoned”, etc.

The themes of Mayakovsky’s satire are also developed in his comedies “The Bedbug” and “Bathhouse”. In “The Bedbug” a certain Prisypkin is depicted, who changed his last name “for grace” to Pierre Skripkin. “A former worker, now a groom,” he married the girl Elzevira Renaissance, a manicurist who “cut off Prysypkin’s former claws.” For the upcoming “red wedding” he purchases “red ham”, “red bottles and red stuff”. As a result of a series of fantastic events, Prisypkin manages to survive in a frozen state until the coming communist society. It is defrosted, and people of the future look at this “vodka-eating mammal” with surprise. However, he spreads around himself the pathogenic bacilli of alcoholism, sycophancy and guitar-romance sensitivity. And Prisypkin, as a rare specimen of “Phibitus vulgaris”, together with his constant companion “Clopus normalis”, is placed as an exhibit in the zoological garden.

Mayakovsky's second comedy is a sharp satire on bureaucracy. ““Bathhouse” washes (simply erases) bureaucrats,” wrote Mayakovsky. The central character of the play is glavnachpups (chief supervisor of approval management) Pobedonosikov. He is trying to go in the “time machine” invented by the Komsomol members into the future, into the “communist age.” He even prepared mandates and travel certificates and writes out daily allowances from the “average calculation for 100 years.” But “the time machine rushed forward in five years, in tenfold steps, carrying away workers and workers and spitting out Pobedonosikov and others like him.”

Mayakovsky's set of satirical means is exceptionally rich and varied. “Weapons of the most beloved kind” - this is how the poet called his brave “cavalry of witticisms”, whose heroic raids were truly irresistible.

Mayakovsky's favorite satirical technique is extreme hyperbolism. An endlessly exaggerated phenomenon becomes already fantastic. Mayakovsky used these fantastic and grotesque hyperboles in his early “Hymns”. Thus, in the “Hymn to the Judge” we read:

The judge's eyes are like a pair of tins flickering in a garbage pit.

An orange-blue peacock got under his stern eye,

Like a post -

And the peacock’s magnificent tail instantly faded!

In general, Mayakovsky is inimitable in the art of caricature - satirical emphasis, condensation of exposed features. An excellent example in this regard is the poem “6 Nuns”:

Sober,

like a boric solution, together,

squadron, sit down to eat. After having lunch together

hiding in the restroom. One yawned -

six yawn... You'll come at night -

they sit and mutter. Dawn in roses -

bitches mutter! And during the day

and at night, and in the morning, and at noon they sit

and mutter

God's fools.

It is difficult to imagine a more damning caricature of religious bigotry.

Literary parodies play a very important role in Mayakovsky’s satirical arsenal. The parodied Pushkin text was excellently used in the poem “Good!” The most tender poetic duet between Tatyana and the nanny is played out by the old lady Kuskova, inflamed with passion for Kerensky (“Why is this girl drying up and withering? She’s silent... but the feeling, apparently, is great”) and the “mustachioed nanny,” “the seasoned Pe En Milyukov.” A witty parody unusually enhances the effect of satirical exposure. Such is Mayakovsky’s sharply stinging satire, always witty and original.

On March 5, 1922, Izvestia published the poem “The Satisfied.” Mayakovsky begins the story with calm irony about the beginning of the working day of the “over-sitting”: at first light they rush to the offices to surrender to the power of “paperwork.” Already at the beginning of the second stanza, the image of a petitioner appears, “since the time she” has been knocking on the thresholds of the institution in the hope of getting an “audience” with its leader - the elusive “Comrade Ivan Vanych,” who sits endlessly. Mocking the supposedly important matters that Ivan Vanych and his subordinates are dealing with, Mayakovsky resorts to hyperbole. Their concerns are the question of merging the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat for Education with the Main Directorate of Horse Breeding under the People's Commissariat of Land (TEO and GUKON), the question of “purchasing a bottle of ink by a gubong cooperative,” etc. Mayakovsky takes the hyperbole to the grotesque: a terrible picture: he sees “half the people” sitting there and decides that a terrible crime has occurred. The grotesque, that is, comically terrible nature of the picture, which depicts the sitting “half of the people,” is emphasized by the “calmest” attitude of the secretary, who considers such a situation, from which the poor petitioner’s mind “went crazy,” to be completely natural:

twenty meetings

We need to keep up.

Involuntarily you have to split into two.

Up to the waist here

but other

From the everyday use of the phraseological phrase “I won’t be torn in two,” conveyed by the poet in the literal sense, it becomes clear how this comically terrible picture arose. The “calmest” voice of the secretary did not calm the poet-petitioner, so he cannot sleep and greets the dawn of the next day with the dream of such a meeting that would eradicate all meetings. And in this dream there is no irony, no hyperbole, no grotesque: like many of Mayakovsky’s satirical poems, “The Sitting Ones” ends with a call to put an end to the evil that is ridiculed in the main part of the poem. Thanks to Mayakovsky, the word “sitting” became a common noun for the senseless bustle of a meeting.

Lev Kassil talks about how Mayakovsky hated even “the slightest manifestation of bureaucratic arrogance,” and quotes the poet’s words about one bureaucrat: “I got hold of some piece of paper with a seal and was already intoxicated by its power... A special bureaucratic alcohol. Drunk from the paper. He already wants to kill a person with a piece of paper.” These words are topical, since you see the same bureaucrats on our television screens and on the pages of today’s magazines and newspapers. It is Mayakovsky’s satire that gives us weapons against such bureaucrats of today.

No other works of Russian poets are as replete with irony and ridicule as the work of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky. unusually sharp, topical and mainly socially oriented.

Curriculum Vitae

Mayakovsky's homeland was Georgia. It was there, in the village of Baghdad, that the future poet was born on July 17, 1893. In 1906, after the death of his father, he moved to Moscow with his mother and sisters. For his active political position he was imprisoned several times. Finishes While still a student, Mayakovsky’s futuristic path begins. Satire - along with shockingness and bravado - becomes a distinctive feature of his poetry.

However, futurism with its nihilistic protest could not fully accommodate the full power of Mayakovsky’s literary word, and the themes of his poems quickly began to go beyond the boundaries of his chosen direction. More and more social overtones were heard in them. The pre-revolutionary period in Mayakovsky's poetry has two distinct directions: accusatory and satirical, revealing all the shortcomings and vices of the disastrous, behind which the terrible reality destroys the person who embodies the ideal of democracy and humanism.

Thus, satire in Mayakovsky’s work on the most early stages creativity became a distinctive feature of the poet among his comrades in the literary workshop.

What is futurism?

The word "futurism" is derived from the Latin futurum, meaning "future". This is the name given to the avant-garde movement of the early 20th century, characterized by the denial of past achievements and the desire to create something radically new in art.

Features of futurism:

• Anarchy and rebellion.
• Denial of cultural heritage.
• Cultivating progress and industry.
• Shocking and pathos.
• Denial of established norms of versification.
• Experiments in the field of versification with rhyme, rhythm, focus on slogans.
• Creating new words.

All these principles are reflected in the best possible way in Mayakovsky’s poetry. Satire organically flows into these innovations and creates unique style inherent in the poet.

What is satire?

Satire is a way of artistic description of reality, the task of which is to expose, ridicule, and impartial criticism social phenomena. Satire most often uses hyperbole and the grotesque to create a distorted conventional image that personifies the unsightly side of reality. Its main characteristic feature is a pronounced negative attitude towards what is depicted.

The aesthetic orientation of satire is the cultivation of the main humanistic values: kindness, justice, truth, beauty.

Satire has a deep history in Russian literature, its roots can already be found in folklore, and later it migrated to the pages of books thanks to A.P. Sumarokov, D.I. Fonvizin and many others. In the 20th century, the power of Mayakovsky’s satire in poetry is unparalleled.

Satire in verse

Already in the early stages of his work, Vladimir Mayakovsky collaborated with the magazines “New Satyricon” and “Satyricon”. The satire of this period has a touch of romanticism and is directed against the bourgeoisie. The poet’s early poems are often compared to Lermontov’s because of the opposition of the author’s “I” to the surrounding society, because of the pronounced rebellion of loneliness. Although Mayakovsky’s satire is clearly present in them. The poems are close to futuristic settings and are very original. Among these can be called: “Nate!”, “Hymn to the Scientist,” “Hymn to the Judge,” “Hymn to Lunch,” etc. Already in the titles of the works themselves, especially with regard to “hymns,” irony is heard.

Mayakovsky's post-revolutionary work dramatically changes its direction. Now his heroes are not well-fed bourgeois, but enemies of the revolution. The poems are complemented by slogans and reflect the surrounding changes. Here the poet showed himself as an artist, since many of his works consisted of poetry and drawings. These posters were included in the ROSTA window series. Their characters are irresponsible peasants and workers, White Guards and bourgeois. Many posters expose the vices of modernity that remain from past life, since post-revolutionary society seems to Mayakovsky to be an ideal, and everything bad in it is remnants of the past.

Among the most famous works, where Mayakovsky’s satire reaches its apogee, are the poems “The Satisfied,” “About Rubbish,” “A Poem about Myasnitskaya, about a woman and about an all-Russian scale.” The poet uses the grotesque to create absurd situations and often speaks from a position of reason and a sound understanding of reality. All the power of Mayakovsky's satire is aimed at exposing the shortcomings and ugliness of the world around us.

Satire in plays

Satire in Mayakovsky’s work is not limited to poems; it also appeared in plays, becoming a meaning-forming center for them. The most famous of them are “Bedbug” and “Bath”.

The play “Bath” was written in 1930, and the author’s irony begins with the definition of its genre: “a drama in six acts with a circus and fireworks.” Its conflict lies in the confrontation between the official Pobedonosikov and the inventor Chudakov. The work itself is perceived as light and funny, but it shows the struggle against a senseless and ruthless bureaucratic machine. The conflict of the play is resolved very simply: a “phosphorus woman” arrives from the future and takes away best representatives humanity with itself, to where communism reigns, and the bureaucrats are left with nothing.

The play “The Bedbug” was written in 1929, and on its pages Mayakovsky wages war against the philistinism. The main character, Pierre Skripkin, after a failed marriage, miraculously finds himself in a communist future. It is impossible to clearly understand Mayakovsky’s attitude to this world. The poet's satire mercilessly ridicules his shortcomings: the work is done by machines, love is eradicated... Skripkin seems to be the most alive and real person here. Under his influence, society gradually begins to collapse.

Conclusion

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky becomes a worthy successor to the traditions of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and N. V. Gogol. In his poems and plays, he manages to aptly identify all the “ulcers” and shortcomings of the writer’s contemporary society. Satire in Mayakovsky's works has a pronounced focus on the fight against philistinism, the bourgeoisie, bureaucracy, and the absurdity of the world around us and its laws.

(based on the poem “The Sitting Ones”)

Speaking about the features that determine the character of satire, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: “In order for satire to be truly satire and achieve its goal, it is necessary, firstly, that it make the reader feel the ideal from which its creator and , secondly, so that she is quite clearly aware of the object against which her sting is directed.” Mayakovsky's satire fully satisfies these requirements: in it one can always feel the social ideal for which the poet is fighting, and the evil against which its edge is directed is clearly defined.

Mayakovsky's satire is diverse in genre. From a very peculiar satirical “hymn” in pre-revolutionary poetry, he came to a cheerful, witty caricature with its inherent tendency towards a satirical image-mask, and the widespread use of hyperbole in post-revolutionary poetry. In the 20s, in poems about foreign countries, he turned to the genre of lyric-epic, plot-based poems, which often contain satire. The poet also works a lot and persistently in the genre of poetic satirical feuilleton. This genre, which emerged in Mayakovsky’s poetry already in the early 20s, reached its greatest development in the last period of his creative career. This genre includes his satirical poems “About Rubbish” and “Sitting Over.” The central themes of the poet’s satirical work are philistinism and bureaucracy. If the poem “About Rubbish” denounces philistinism, then in the poem “The Satisfied,” written a year later, satire is for the first time directed against bureaucracy. And although the problem of “bureaucracy” was subsequently reflected in many works, “Those who sat in session” remained one of the best examples of Mayakovsky’s satire on this topic.

The peculiarity of the poem “Sessions” is that it does not depict a specific image of a bureaucrat, but there is a generalized picture of bureaucrats sitting in session. The satirical effect in the poem is created gradually. At the beginning of the poem, there is little to foreshadow its satirical sound:

The night will soon turn into dawn,
I see every day:
who is in charge,
who is in whom,
who is watered,
who's in the gap
people disperse into institutions.

But the satirical sound of the second stanza is no longer in doubt:

It rains on paperwork,
as soon as you enter the building:
having selected about fifty -
The most important! —
employees leave for the meeting.

For Mayakovsky, bureaucracy will always mean the blind power of a piece of paper, a circular, an instruction, which is used to the detriment of living business. It is no coincidence that “in his poems about the Soviet passport,” the poet speaks so sharply about bureaucratic paper (“any piece of paper go to hell with your mothers…”).

The image of “paper rain” outlined in “The Sat” is very remarkable in this regard and will be continued in a number of subsequent works by the poet. However, this poem does not receive development, because Mayakovsky is interested in something else here - the rage of bureaucrats. It would be wrong to believe that the meeting was shelled at all. We are talking about bureaucratic meetings, which, in full accordance with the essence of bureaucracy, replace real business with conversations, decisions, resolutions, and the very topics of these meetings, meetings, deliberations are far-fetched. Throughout the poem, the poet emphasizes the clearly bureaucratic, arch-formal nature of the meetings:

Comrade Ivan Vanych went to the meeting -
the unification of Theo and Gukon...
...Meeting:
buying a bottle of ink
Gubcooperative...

The petitioner, who has been visiting the thresholds of this institution “since the time of her” to take an audience with one of its employees (a certain Ivan Vanych), cannot find him on the spot, because the elusive Ivan Vanych is constantly at some meetings. Mayakovsky himself had to deal with bureaucratic red tape when he tried (a year before the creation of “The Satisfied Ones”) to publish the play “Mystery Bouffe” in Gosizdat. In his statements to the commission, to departments, in some letters of that time, Mayakovsky tells how he had to face “bureaucracy in its pure form,” with “bureaucracy mixed with mockery,” he writes about how he “beat the thresholds of the head.” Of course, in "The Sat" these biographical facts are extremely generalized, but they cannot be ignored.

Four times a day, the unfortunate petitioner climbs to the “top floor of a seven-story building,” but still cannot find Ivan Vanych. Every time he hears the same answer: “They are in session.” But the main thing is not that Ivan Vanych sits, but at which meetings he spends his official time, since this is where the bureaucratic essence of the “over-sitting” is revealed. After the first attempt to meet with Ivan Vanych, the petitioner hears that Ivan Vanych “went to sit” on the “unification of Theo and Gukon.” Only in the brain of a notorious bureaucrat could the idea of ​​uniting such different institutions as the Theater Department of the Main Political Education (TEO) and the Main Directorate of Horse Breeding under the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (GUKON) be born.

And Mayakovsky, relying on a real fact (in 1921, the former head of the TEO director S.N. Kel was appointed to work in ... Gukon as the head of the horse breeding department), goes further, forcing bureaucrats to generally raise the question of uniting these incompatible institutions and thereby achieving a sharply satirical effect.

For the fourth time, already “looking at night,” the petitioner comes to the institution and learns that the mysterious Ivan Vanych is this time “at a meeting of the a-be-ve-ge-de-e-zhe-ze-kom.” This gobbledygook ridicules the love of complex abbreviations that characterized the twenties.
In the end, the “enraged” visitor, “spitting out wild curses on the way,” bursts into the meeting, brought to white heat, and sees a “terrible picture” - halves of people sitting, for “involuntarily they have to split into two. Up to the waist here, and the rest there.” The fantastic picture of a meeting of bureaucrats, where “half of the people” are sitting, is, of course, the same grotesque, built on the literal understanding of the expression “split in half,” “split in two.” No matter how fantastic the picture painted by the poet is, it only emphasizes reality - the bench bustle of bureaucrats. The satirical effect is further enhanced by the fact that the “enraged”, rushing from “ scary picture“The hero is confronted by the “calmest voice” of the secretary:

They are at two meetings at once.
In a day
twenty meetings
We need to keep up.
Involuntarily we have to split up...

The final stanza sums up the entire poem. “Oh, at least one more meeting regarding the eradication of all meetings” - these lines have become truly nationally famous; they are applicable to all kinds of bureaucratic meetings. Mayakovsky’s neologism “settled” has firmly entered into Russian colloquial speech.