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Mayakovs Ki (1893-1930) Soviet poet and playwright. Born in Georgia into a family of foresters. He began writing poetry in 1912 and was deeply influenced by Futurism. His "Religious Revue" was the first dramatic work in the Soviet Union with a high ideological and artistic level. Afterwards, there is a long poem "Good!" ", satirical comedies "Bug", "Bath House", etc. He was a drama innovator who advocated that the stage should be highly theatrical and hypothetical, and opposed naturalistic depictions of life. His theater theories had a lasting impact on later Soviet drama. [1]
Chinese name
Mayakovsky
Nationality
Soviet Union
Place of birth
p>Georgia
Date of birth
1893
Date of death
1930
Occupation
p>Poet and playwright
Representative works
"Okay!" 》"Religious Farce"
Mayakovsky
The Soviet genius poet Mayakovsky (1893-1930) only lived a short 37 years. He was free and uninhibited and Bright and magnanimous. To this day, he is still wrapped in many mysteries: one is his suicide; the other is his love.
Mayakovsky never married, but in his suicide note before committing suicide, he listed two women who had no blood relationship with him as family members. These two women, Lilia and Veronica, were his lovers and companions. In fact, they were not the only women Mayakovsky loved. He never concealed his love for women in his poetry creation. This love brought him infinite happiness and joy, inspiring him to produce dazzling sparks of inspiration; at the same time, it also plunged him into endless distress and sorrow. As a poet, Mayakovsky's creation, life and death were closely intertwined with women and love.
Mayakovsky made a lyrical confession to the audience. Because his experience was so socially significant and provocative, the confession became propaganda and the author became a speaker. In his first play, Mayakovsky showed his basic pursuit of drama, which, as he later said, was to "turn the theater into a forum."
Mayakovsky staged this tragedy in Petersburg in December 1913 and played the leading role. This tragedy was incompatible with the atmosphere and taste of the theater world at that time, and bourgeois public opinion frantically denigrated it, calling it a "***" script and a "dream raving of a neurotic patient." In Mayakovsky's words, "The bourgeoisie's nose smelled out that we were soldiers with bombs."
Mayakovsky had a strong interest in drama since he was a child. During the stormy days of the 1905 revolution, 12-year-old Mayakovsky watched a play performed by a Georgian theater group calling on people to resist social oppression, and became deeply fascinated by drama.
The shift from poetry to drama came naturally to Mayakovsky, since his poetry was dramatic in nature. One characteristic of his poetry is that it can only be truly understood when listening to it recited at the end. Mayakovsky's poetic drama uses the language of an orator. The lines are full of exclamations, and there are many calls and questions. Since the content itself expresses actions, the rhythm of the poem is full of changes. Mayakovsky's poetry has a lot of characteristics. of action. Mayakovsky knew this well and said that every one of his works could be performed on the stage.
Mayakovsky's propaganda posters and the illustrations he made for his books are also full of action. His "Rosta Window" has a strong political nature, using the form of poems and paintings, clean Although simple, it is often dramatic. The characters in the painting are lifelike, used to match the simplicity and vividness of the picture, and can easily be converted into text descriptions in the script to describe the characters' actions and specific scenes. Therefore, it can be said that Mayakovsky's creations have an obvious dramatic tendency, and drama almost runs through all his activities and plays an important role in them.
Rational Drama
Mayakovsky is one of the most representative playwrights of European rational drama in the first half of the twentieth century. Great writers who are representatives of rational drama include Gorky, Bernard Shaw, Capek, Brecht and others. Compared with these great writers, Mayakovsky's drama has a prominent feature, that is, it has the most distinct political tendency. According to Meyerhold, tendency is the most fundamental characteristic of Mayakovsky as a playwright. Mayakovsky once said that the essence of his theater work was to "make the stage a forum." He bluntly claimed that literature should "put purpose first" and "art is a tool for class struggle."
"Religious Revue", which reflects the October Revolution, praises workers and criticizes exploiters, "Bedbug", which criticizes the habits of small citizens, and "Bath House", which exposes bureaucracy, all have very distinct political tendencies.
In order to facilitate the elaboration of macro-political theories and "materialization" of ideas, the backgrounds of Mayakovsky's dramas are often of a global scale, adopting an epic and broad perspective, and using magnificent and extreme exaggeration. "Religious Revue" once used 350 actors. The plot goes from "the whole world" to Noah's Ark, then to heaven, to hell, and finally to paradise. The time-space jump transformation is the largest. Characters of all walks of life share the stage with the devil, angels, God, "saints" such as Tolstoy who died in the past, "people of the future", and dozens of anthropomorphized items in paradise such as bread, salt, and sugar. show. Politics and art, poetry and song, sublimity and comedy are combined together like a "concrete". In "Bugs", the time jump spans 50 years, and a frozen corpse miraculously resurrects half a century later. Its harmful effects spread like a plague to dogs and from dogs to humans. A group of girls went crazy... In the play "Bath House", modern people are mixed with "phosphorescent women" from the future, and the main play is interspersed with acrobatics and fireworks. People use Einstein's theory of relativity to build a "time locomotive" and rush to 2030. In the new century, the birth of communism has become history.
If we make a horizontal comparison, it is not difficult to find that among the representatives of European rational drama, Mayakovsky and Brecht are the most similar. The two of them started writing the script very close to each other, and the rational and conceptual factors in the play are the most prominent. It can be said that Brecht enriched Mayakovsky's tendentious drama, and it can also be said that Mayakovsky anticipated many things in Brecht's drama. Mayakovsky used drama to serve the revolutionary struggle earlier than Brecht. In 1918, he wrote the "Communist Drama" praising the October Revolution - "Religious Revue", Brecht Hitt did not accept Marxism until 1927. In a sense, "Religious Revue" can be said to be Mayakovsky's precursor to Brecht.
Modern Drama
Mayakovsky’s plays can be classified as European rational dramas in terms of the tendency of their content, and in terms of innovation in form and technique, they are the same as European rational dramas. European Futurism and Expressionism have many similarities.
Mayakovsky was particularly closely associated with Futurism. He repeatedly claimed to be a futurist. In his 1913 article "Theatre, Cinema, Futurism", he claimed that he would "wreak havoc" "in every department of the United States" "for the sake of Futurist art", and drama was no exception. He opposed "lyrical ***", opposed beautifully installed sets and props, and advocated "drama toward the future." Mayakovsky believed that modern life required accelerating the pace of language, making it "quick, economical, and concise." He replaced long, complex sentences with short sentences and created "telecommunication-themed" language. Words should be transformed, destroyed, renewed daily. In terms of character creation, Mayakovsky advocated depicting "new people", that is, "future people"; this new people are not the isolated and helpless individual heroes in past literature and art, but live in "groups" and "mobs" Among them, there are strong people with a sense of unity and responsibility, who are brave and optimistic. Mayakovsky, like the Futurists, was extremely interested in modern science and technology. He was obsessed with Einstein's theory of relativity. In 1920, he attended a course on Einstein's theory. The "time locomotive" in "The Bathhouse" is a vivid metaphor.
Although Mayakovsky has many similarities with futurists, he belongs to left-wing futurism. He said: "Futurism is a traditional name for us. Our abbreviation is: 'Kofu' (Communist-Futurist). Ideologically, we have no similarities with Italian Futurism. The only difference is in the formal processing of materials. "
There are also similarities between Mayakovsky and Expressionism. The themes and ideas of his scripts are often external and specially specified. The author's intention is obvious and artificial throughout the entire plot. When talking about the creation of "Bug", Mayakovsky bluntly said that he "compressed and summarized the "facts" on the two central characters of the comedy" and translated the "facts" into actionable and fascinating "Some of his expression techniques are also expressionistic. For example, at the end of "Bedbug", Prisuipokin is put into a zoo cage with an "ordinary bedbug". This scene is closely related to O'Neill's expressionist name. The ending of the play "The Hairy Ape" is treated almost exactly the same.
It can be said that Mayakovsky created a completely new style based on actively drawing on the techniques of Futurism, Expressionism, and Symbolism, which shocked even the most famous Russian art masters at the time. Drama is used to praise the October Revolution, praise workers, and criticize petty bourgeois habits and bureaucracy. His drama can be said to be a bridge from the symbolism of the late 19th century, the Futurism, and Expressionism of the early 20th century to Brecht's narrative drama. It is an indispensable link in the history of the development of European drama.
Meyerhold's system
Just as Chekhov was the playwright of Stanislavsky's system, Mayakovsky was the playwright of Meyerhold's system of drama. Together with Meyerhold, he established a new type of political drama in the Soviet Union in the 20th century.
This new type of drama was later named by people from different angles, including epic drama, narrative drama, metaphorical drama, hypothetical political drama, rational drama, montage drama, dialectical drama, etc. [2]
Mayakovsky and Meyerhold’s dramatic exploration and innovation have several characteristics that deserve our attention:
First, they oppose the "interior" that depicts personal psychology. "drama. Mayakovsky repeatedly emphasized that he was "against indoor art and against psychological guessing." He believed that psychological realism drama was about "hiding in a cage-like home" to "guess other people's psychology" and advocated that drama should "personalize the psychology of others". "Shake it out from the "cassock". Mayakovsky and Meyerhold targeted the tradition of psychological realism followed by the Moscow Art Theater headed by Stanilavsky. They even mocked "Mo Yi" in the lines of the script and asked the actors to tear the "Mo Yi" poster to pieces. This tendency against psychological description was inevitable after the October Revolution. Just as some critics have concluded - the so-called art that expresses people's secret psychology cannot be tolerated in the revolutionary era.
Although the opinions of Mayakovsky and Meyerhold are one-sided, this tendency to ignore personal psychological portrayal and focus on expressing people’s social attributes is precisely the characteristic of Soviet political dramas and Bleit Hope. The outstanding characteristics of narrative drama represented by Meyerhold's introduction, that is to say, it has formed the basic characteristics of a new dramatic genre.
Second, it is highly hypothetical. Mayakovsky firmly opposed drama that "conveys a photographic depiction of life" and believed that the "dead background" of realistic set props could only constrain the actor's art. He admired Shakespeare's plays "without scenery devices" and appreciated virtual performances. The "time locomotive" in "The Bathhouse" is also virtual. The script states that this "invisible locomotive" is actually performed virtually by the characters in the play." To move "drag" and "hold". It can be seen that Mayakovsky's views on drama are quite close to Meyerhold's. The reason why Meyerhold spoke highly of Mayakovsky's plays in the face of opposition and had the insight to discover valuable originality in places where critics considered flaws was because they all respected hypothetical drama.
Mayakovsky was good at breaking genre boundaries and combining many opposing elements. In his scripts, there are both critical satirical themes and eulogizing heroic themes; there are every satirical object of the bug Prisuipotkin and Bayan, as well as professors and professors of the "Institute of the Resurrection of the Human Body" Wait for positive people. In the poster for "Bug", it is said that this comedy makes people both "laugh" and frown... All this shows that Mayakovsky is the most bold and thorough innovator of drama. The high degree of synthesis of multiple opposing factors created a new drama genre, created conditions for Meyerhold's stage art innovation, and provided an example for the development of Soviet political drama.
Following the revivals of "Bug" and "The Bathhouse" in Moscow in the 1950s, Mayakovsky fever arose in the world of theater in the 1960s and 1970s. Mayakovsky's plays have been staged in Italy and France, in Stockholm, London and Tokyo, in Eastern European countries and as far away as Cuba. History has proven that Mayakovsky occupies an important place in the world literary world, both as a poet and a playwright.
In 1913, Mayakovsky first entered the field of drama. The 20-year-old poet published three articles on drama and film, criticizing the stereotypes in the theater world at that time and calling for the creation of new dramatic forms. In this year, Mayakovsky created his first script - "Vladimir Mayakovsky". The play creates an image of a very sensitive poet who cannot stand the Russian autocratic rule, and shows his tragic experience. The script foreshadows the emerging revolutionary storm, but the protest against society is expressed in rather peculiar images. The playwright himself plays the role of his eponymous protagonist, and with him are some imaginary characters, such as "an old man (thousands of years old) leading a group of black and skinny cats," an eyeless and faded "A person with two kisses", etc. These eccentric characters reflect people's mental pain, hatred of capitalist urban life and desire for pure love in real life.