Resumo de Mayakovsky A Tragedy - Vladimir Mayakovsky

Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, was first performed in 1913 at Luna Park in St Petersburg. Vladimir Mayakovsky?s play consisted of Mayakovsky, Poet, and other characters who, in many ways, were reflections of his own personality. man with One Ear, Man without a Head, Woman with a Great Big Tear, among others, all praise and denounce the Poet in turn. Abstract in its structure, the play is made up of a series of monologues that describe the characters? views of the city, human suffering, love and, of course, Vladimir Mayakovsky. At the start of the play, Mayakovsky asserts his position as a poet: ?Ladies and Gentleman!/ if you wish,/ a remarkable poet will dance for you right here and now?(Mayakovsky, 23). By the second act, Mayakovsky, symbolically dressed in a toga and crowned with a laurel wreath, is elevated to the realm of genius. The people of the city encircle the poet and give him their stories of suffering; they hand him a pile of solid tears, which he packs in a briefcase to carry away with him. Thus encumbered with humanity?s communal pain, he starts on his journey towards martyrdom.
The premiere of the first futurist play, A Tragedy, encapsulates the challenges that faced early Russian Avant-Garde artists, such as Mayakovsky, as they attempt to create works that are theatrically interesting, yet cross the boundaries between art and theatre, poetry and playwrighting. Another futurist writer, Benedikt Livshits, describes in his memoir, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, Mayakovsky?s performance at Luna Park as a spectacle that combined two genres: ?In playing himself, in hanging up his cloak of buffoonery, in adjusting his striped jacket, in lighting up his cigarette and in reading out his versus, Mayakovsky threw an invisible bridge across the two art forms, and he did this in the only form conceivable and in front of an audience which suspected nothing? (Livshits, 161).
What Mayakovsky offered in 1913 was a struggle to merge different genres into a new art form of the avant-garde. As Kandinsky?s series of paintings entitled, Poetry Without Words transformed painting into poetry, so Mayakovsky translated theatre into painting and brought poetry to life. The play?s poetic imagery combine with the surreal characters, i.e. Man With the Long Drawn-Out Face, to create an elaborate web in which the action of the play is caught. The Futurists challenge our perceptions of the nature of theatre, poetry and painting and endeavor to transform them into a genre that encompasses all art forms.
The relationship between the poet and the people remains at the heart of Mayakovsky?s play. The jibes and interaction between the other characters and Mayakovsky causes a counter-balance between the poet?s words and his relationship with the townspeople. Unlike Zangezi, Mayakovsky has little to teach but much to experience. The townspeople appear as fragmented figures such as: Woman with a Tiny Tear, Man with a Long Drawn out Face, etc ? A recurrent theme in the play is the plea for sympathy by both the artist and the public. The poet records the people?s suffering while lamenting his own. The sorrow in the market place contains a quality of anger and despair of the cumulative experience of humanity.

Resumos Relacionados