Though they lived a century apart and wrote in starkly disparate historical, cultural, and literary contexts, Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Mayakovsky were both victims of the posthumous processes of bureaucratization and monumentalization at the hands of the Soviet regime. Their biographies, politics, and poetry were sanitized and manipulated for use as state propaganda. This dissertation synthesizes several scholarly approaches including theories of poetry, close reading of prosody and metaphor, and analysis of biographical and cultural context in order to analyze Mayakovsky’s relationship with Pushkin and his legacy. Ultimately, I argue that Mayakovsky uses his poetry both as a means of “resurrecting” Pushkin from his posthumous stagnation and as his own “immortalization program”—a plan through which Mayakovsky hoped to be similarly resurrected by his descendants and rescued from his second death as a lifeless monument of “marble slime.” Much of my analysis centers on Mayakovsky’s treatment of the Pushkinian themes of the monument and the destructive statue, which appear throughout his oeuvre in many different forms and provide a wealth of information about Mayakovsky’s concerns regarding his relationship with Pushkin and his own poetic immortality.

Creator

• Trinks, Jasmine

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-p533-qe88

Subject

• Slavic literature
• Literature
• Slavic studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_862480
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15854

Keyword

• Futurism
• Russian Modernism
• Modernism
• Poetry
• Communism
• Soviet Literature

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright