Vladimir Mayakovsky

"On the pavement of my trampled soul the steps of madmen weave the prints of rude crude words."

"Tramp squares with rebellious treading! Up heads! As proud peaks be seen! In the second flood we are spreading Every city on earth will be clean."

"Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes."

"A rhyme's … a barrel of dynamite. A line is a fuse that's lit. The line smoulders, the rhyme explodes – and by a stanza a city is blown to bits."

"I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood – what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain."

"Love for us is no paradise of arbors — to us love tells us, humming, that the stalled motor of the heart has started to work again."

"Agitprop sticks in my teeth too, and I'd rather compose romances for you – more profit in it and more charm. But I subdued myself, setting my heel on the throat of my own song."

"In parade deploying the armies of my pages, I shall inspect the regiments in line. Heavy as lead, my verses at attention stand, ready for death and for immortal fame."

"Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life. We're quits: stupid to draw up a list of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains."

"I understand the power and the alarm of words – Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes, but those which make coffins break from bearers and on their four oak legs walk right away."

"No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk – handsome, twentytwoyearold."

"If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: not a man, but a cloud in trousers!"

"Hey, you! Heaven! Off with your hat! I am coming! Not a sound. The universe sleeps, its huge paw curled upon a star-infested ear."

"Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it."

"One evening Ilyich (Lenin) wanted to see for himself how the young people were getting on in the communes. We decided to visit our young friend Varya Armand who lived in a commune for art school students. I think that we made the visit on the day Kropotkin was buried, in 1921. It was a hungry year, but the young people were filled with enthusiasm. The people in the commune slept practically on bare boards, they had neither bread nor salt. "But we do have cereals," said a radiantfaced member of the commune. With this cereal they boiled a good porridge for Ilyich. Ilyich looked at the young people, at the radiant faces of the boys and girls who crowded around him, and their joy was reflected in his face. They showed him their naive drawings, explained their meaning. and bombarded him with questions. And he, smiling, evaded answering and parried by asking questions of his own: "What do you read? Do you read Pushkin?" -- "Oh, no," said someone, "after all he was a bourgeois; we read Mayakovsky." Ilyich smiled. "I think," he said, "that Pushkin is better." After this Ilyich took a more favourable view of Mayakovsky. Whenever the poet's name was mentioned he recalled the young art students who, full of life and gladness, and ready to die for the Soviet system, were unable to find words in the contemporary language with which to express themselves, and sought the answer in the obscure verse of Mayakovsky. Later, however, Ilyich once praised Mayakovsky for the verse in which he ridiculed Soviet red tape."

"He stands with one foot on Mont Blanc and with the other on the Elbrus. His voice out-thunders thunder. What is the wonder that…the proportions of earthly things vanish and that no difference is left between the small and the great?…No doubt this hyperbolic style reflects in some measure the frenzy of our time. But this does not provide it with an overall artistic justification. It is impossible to out-clamour war and revolution, but it is easy to get hoarse in the attempt."

"He was perhaps the only tolerable propaganda poet of all time: he meant it, and the energy he put into it was, as is frequently said, demonic."

"Incomprehensible rubbish."

"Mayakovsky was and is the best and most talented poet of our Soviet era. Indifference to his memory and works is a crime."

"With this man, the newness of our times was climatically and uniquely in his blood. His very strangeness was one with the strangeness of the age, an age still half unrealised."

"You don't have to be a poet, but you do have to be a citizen. Well, Mayakovsky was not a citizen, he was a lackey, who served Stalin faithfully. He added his babble to the magnification of the immortal image of the leader and teacher."