Throw Mayakovsky off the Steamboat of Modernity: Debates about the Poet Among the Successors of the Avant-Garde

Slavic Literatures (ранее - Russian Literature). 2025. No. 154-156. P. 317–335.

Pavlovets M.

The artwork of Vladimir Mayakovsky already in his lifetime was being criticized by two opposite groups: both by the opponents of the new art and by those who saw his artwork as not radical or Futurist” enough. After the posthumous canonization of the poet those debates came to an end, although they gained a new, different acuteness in the late twentieth century. The official status of the founder of Soviet poetry” did not manage to fully overshadow the real Mayakovsky – the rebel and experimenter in poetry. Nevertheless, the replacement of juvenile love towards Mayakovsky for some young poets implied the transition from early immature artwork to the period of mature artwork: having acquainted themselves with Mayakovsky’s pre-revolutionary legacy, many poets discovered the hidden or forgotten part of the poetic legacy of the avant-garde. At the same time, attitudes towards Mayakovsky divided the proponents of the neo-avant-garde – the radical line of the post-war avant-garde – and those who did not see the legacy of the historical avant-garde” as an arsenal of methods and techniques already explored by poetry, and who also did not share the idea of artistic experiments as a priority.

Keywords: futurism, футуризм, Aleksander Kondratov, Александр Кондратов, Sergej Birjukov, Сергей Бирюков, Владимир Маяковский, Konstantin Kuzminsky, Константин Кузьминский, Vladimir Mayakovsky, неоавангард, neo-avant-garde

Publication based on the results of: Language, literature and culture in historical and social perspective (2025)