Cripples in Utopia: Mayakovsky's Materiality of Metaphor

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media II: Marxism, Poetry and Poetics

Abstract

In the nearly one hundred years since Vladimir Mayakovsky’s death and subsequent canonization by Stalin as the “best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch”, a cultural mythology has developed around the figure of the poet which identifies him strongly with dominant Soviet discourses of health, sport, and the muscular masculine body as a Stalinist ideal. However, in Mayakovsky’s own lyric, treatments of the healthy, sick, and disabled body are more complex. Disability studies can provide a new way of examining Mayakovsky’s lyric that helps to strip back some of the posthumous aura which has arisen around the figure of the poet and put Mayakovsky’s poetics of the social body back into the context from which it arose, during the collapse of the Russian Empire and the early days of the Soviet project.

Author

• Ros Herling, UC Berkeley