IMAGES OF THE BROKEN BODY IN V. MAYAKOVSKY'S TRAGEDY «VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY»

Abstract

The paper focuses on corporal images in the art world of the tragedy «Vladimir Mayakovsky» (1913). Special attention is given to images of the broken body as a reflection of Mayakovsky's artistic concept in the early 20th century. Futurists depicted the person as extremely physiological, material expressed, in contrast to the spiritually-unseen images of the symbolists and the harmonious classical body of the 19th century. In his first dramatic play Mayakovsky relies on the aesthetics of the national theatre, where the external is a manifestation of the internal, exaggerated parts of the bodies (belly, legs, mouth etc) become indispensable attributes of the farcical world. The artistic world of the tragedy is occupied by inferior people: a Man without eyes and feet, a Man without ear, a Man without a head etc. On the one hand, these characters represent the broken consciousness of the main hero – poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, in accordance with the genre of monodrama. On the other hand, they are pieces of a broken world, not able to harmonize, to create. All of the links within it (human and social) are destroyed, leading the city (and the world) on the threshold of the Apocalypse. Trying to restore the harmony, the only integral person in the tragedy – Vladimir Mayakovsky – takes all the human suffering to bring them out of the city, repeating the sacrificial way of the Messiah-the Savior.