Mayakovsky and America

Abstract

S LIGHTLY more than forty years ago this year, the United States received a visit from a poet and propagandist who has since generally come to be regarded in the Soviet Union as the genuine literary voice, indeed almost the poetic embodiment, of the October Revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky. The reaction of this distinctive writer to the country which he prophesied might eventually become the armed defender of the hopeless bourgeois cause reveals much about both the United States of that day and Mayakovsky's own personality and general outlook.1 The Soviet poet was by no means the first Russian writer to tour this country, his most significant predecessors being Vladimir Korolenko (1893) and Maxim Gorky (1906). Though Mayakovsky explicitly placed himself in the tradition of these visitors, the circumstances involved in each of these trips were quite varied. Korolenko, a mild-mannered liberal, came to America to see the Chicago World's Fair in August and September of 1893, remaining here little more than a month. His presence was noted by the English-language newspapers, to which he granted at least one interview, but by and large he travelled without publicity. His attitude toward the United States was fundamentally favorable, for he found many facets of American life appealing. At