Az/bu/ka: Mayakovsky and the Soviet Literacy Project

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics I: Poetry as/and Political Action

Abstract

In this presentation, I explore Vladimir Mayakovsky’s previously unstudied poetic primers written and illustrated for the national literacy campaign, “Down with Illiteracy (Doloi negramotnost’)!” In these two primers, Songs for Peasants (Pesni krest’ianam) and Songs for Workers (Pesni rabochim), Mayakovsky uses his newly-adapted laddered verse as a pedagogical device. The poems in these primers instruct the reader on various popular political campaigns: the dangers of alcohol, the hypocrisy of the Russian Orthodox Church, the benefits of the eight-hour workday. I address in this presentation then interplay between propaganda, literacy, and verse within the broader historical context of the period as well as Mayakovsky’s literary oeuvre.

Author

• Carlotta Chenoweth, U.S. Military Academy, West Point