1. On the origin and essence of religion, Akhundov defines religion as a system of views and rules that contains three elements: “faith, worship and morality” (4, 162). Moreover, the third element, in his opinion, is the main, decisive one in all religions. "The main objective

Poem by Mayakovsky Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love

In Mayakovsky’s creative heritage, lyric poetry rightfully takes first place. Without in any way detracting from the importance of epic and dramatic works, it should be recognized that it was lyric poetry that was the genre in which Mayakovsky’s creative individuality was most clearly and fully expressed. Called upon to express the feelings and experiences of the human soul, lyrics allowed Mayakovsky to actively invade reality, express his assessments of observed phenomena, and color his works with the unique flavor of his poetic self.

Mayakovsky highly valued lyrics as a poetic genre. For Mayakovsky, a poetic poet is a kind of propagandist of a certain range of feelings and emotions. And the whole question is what feelings and experiences the lyricist is “campaigning” for, how vividly, artistically convincing and uniquely they are expressed. An understanding of Mayakovsky's lyrics will be incomplete without familiarity with his poems about love. Probably, nowhere else has the innovative character of the poet’s lyrics manifested itself with such expressiveness as in the formulation of this “eternal” theme of poetry. This is especially true of the works of the last period of his creative career - two poetic “letters” - “Letters to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love” and “Letters to Tatyana Yakovleva.” They were written in the autumn of 1928 during Mayakovsky’s stay in Paris under the impression of meeting Tatyana Alekseevna Yakovleva, who had left the USSR for Paris to live with her artist father.

Taras Kostrov was the editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, in which Mayakovsky collaborated and for which he was sent to Paris. This explains the choice of the addressee of the letter in the header. The title also defines the theme - “about the essence of love.” This formulation of the topic seems to parody a philosophical treatise. But besides this, the title emphasizes both the ethical and philosophical aspect of the topic and its partly ironic sound. Thus, we see that the poet’s serious thoughts are adjacent to jokes and irony; that the sublime is clothed in the form of light humor, the sublime is deliberately “lowered.” This tendency is evident from the very first lines:

Sorry

Comrade Kostrov,

With inherent

Soulful expanse,

What part

To Paris of released stanzas

To the lyrics

I'll squander it.

The image of the poet outlined here, “squandering” poetic lines on love lyrics, develops in subsequent stanzas, where the poet, meeting a beauty “decorated in furs and beads” (her prototype is Tatyana Yakovleva), enters into conversation with her (“I am this beauty took it and said: did he say it correctly or incorrectly?”). At this point, the appeal to Kostrov turns into a conversation with the “beauty”, which determines the content of the poem. The beginning of the conversation is clearly frivolous. The poet jokingly admits:

I speak with my teeth -

Agree to listen.

This is by no means a revival of the poet’s image - “Don Juan and the Veil” is just a joke, self-irony, the purpose of which is to somewhat reduce the sound of the subsequent lines:

Don't catch

On rubbish

On the passerby

A couple of feelings.

I'm here forever

Wounded by love -

I'm dragging my feet.

These lines dramatically change the tone of the conversation. From irony the poet moves on to a serious conversation about the “essence of love.” There is no trace left of the appearance of a carefree poet who is “charming his teeth” to girls. Before us is a continuation of a conversation on a topic started by the poet a long time ago - “about love-the-community”, about fidelity and constancy of the feeling of love. “Love-hulk” confronts the “passing pair of feelings” with the simple formula “fell out of love - floated away.” True love is “not measured by a wedding” - it is measured by incomparably greater things and is tested by the entire human life. Further in the poem we talk about Mayakovsky’s understanding of the feeling of love, that is, about the “essence of love”:

Not that

To boil more coolly,

Not that

What they burn with coals,

What rises behind the mountains of breasts

Jungle hair.

The poet refuses to consider love only as a physiological feeling. For him, what is incomparably more important is “what stands behind the mountains of breasts”, what feelings love gives birth to in a person’s heart. And Mayakovsky gives the answer:

This means:

Deep into the yard

And until the night of the rooks,

Shining with an axe,

Chopping wood,

Playfully.

Overwhelmed by love, the lyrical hero of the poem is ready, “with a shining axe, to chop wood,” to compete with Copernicus himself, to create, to write poetry:

This is from the sheets

Torn by insomnia,

Break down

Jealous of Copernicus,

And not my husband

Marya Ivanna.

Rival.

The great meaning of love for Mayakovsky is not that it provides lovers with “paradise for the bush”, but that

What now

Put into operation

Cold motor.

But the “Letter...” is not limited to just defining love as a stimulus that makes the “frozen engine of the heart” work. Mayakovsky goes further, showing the connection between love and creativity. Addressing his interlocutor, the poet wants to explain to her “this state” - the process of the birth of a poetic word. The “poet wounded by love” walks along the streets of the city, and everything is perceived by him through the prism of his excited state (“On the land of lights - to the sky... In the blue sky of stars - to the devil”). A big city is noisy around... In the soul of the poet, a poetic word born of love is ripening. And when “it has boiled”, it arises - the great word of poetry. And it “simmers” not in the quiet of offices, not in solitude from people, but in the very thick of life, city noise, bustle, movement, in the “penny canteen” where the poet went:

And from some penny canteen,

When it boiled over,

From the throat to the stars the word soars

A gold-bearing comet.

Having talked about how a poetic word caused by a feeling of love is born, Mayakovsky raises the question of who this word is addressed to. This “boiling” word is needed in order to

So that two lovers

Look at the stars

From theirs

Lilac gazebos.

To lift

Which weakened the eye.

So that the enemy

Cut off from shoulders

tailed

Shining saber.

Mayakovsky, in his poem “Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris on the Essence of Love,” essentially gives his vision of what a new type of love poetry should be. With this work, he argued that the purpose of poetry - “to lift, and lead, and attract” - also applies to love lyrics. Poems about love should help those who have “weak eyes.” And finally, the poet, listening to his heart, in which all-consuming love is about to hum, declares:

Until the last knock in the chest,

Like on a date

Idle,

I listen:

Love will hum -

Human,

While still working in Paris at a newspaper publishing house, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote a poem in 1938, the writing of which the poet was inspired by a meeting with a certain Yakovleva Tatyana, after which a very good and warm relationship began, and the poet calls the poem “Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about essence of love." This verse was the face of the writer's long love story.

Mayakovsky writes this verse under the guise of a letter, which is what its title reflects. In the letter, the author addresses a specific person, directly to: “Forgive me, Comrade Kostrov,” which is how his poetic letter begins. Thus, the reader feels the authenticity and at the same time the reality of all the feelings that are described. Turning to Kostrovoy, our hero talks about love. Cosmic elements are quite common: “On the land of lights - to the sky... In the blue sky of stars - to the devil”, “if I weren’t a poet, I would become an astronomer.” The main character tells us that with love all fights are useless, battles are empty: “Hurricane, fire, water come up in a murmur.” In the verse “Letter to a comrade ....” Vladimir Vladimirovich conveys his idea that “The heart of everything is only love,” but also does not try to veil sentences and thoughts, but on the contrary, as in love, he writes everything simply and clearly, showing that the feeling of love arises in the simple heart of an ordinary person: “ I can’t measure love by a wedding: if I stopped loving, it floated away,” “Love means running into the depths of the yard.” The poet also uses such simple expressions as “to the devil”, “theirs”. To get rid of unnecessary pathos, irony is included: “The bears would grow wings here.”

There is no identification in the poem: “Love is not about boiling hot.” A conversation about this emotion has the direction: “to lift, and lead, and attract.” Mayakovsky’s love is also described as a creative energy that has been revived and is now at the “boiling point,” when all feelings are at their peak and in an aggravated state, which is a bit like “ecstasy.” Love as a feeling of absorption of the entire universe, comes from the simple soul of an ordinary person. Hope dies last, but I would like to hope for the best, but “the love boat crashed into everyday life.”