Vladimir Mayakovski (1893-1925), the poet of the Russian revolution, arrived in Mexico City on July 8, 1926, at the beginning of a visit that lasted three weeks.
Those days printed the perception of a tragicomic country, warned with sympathy and surprise.
At the train station he was received by the painter Diego Rivera. This July 19 will be the 130th anniversary of his birth.
His extensive journey to cross the Atlantic was recounted in the travel diary My Discovery of America, “an extraordinary book, a mixture of chronicle and essay”, as the back cover of the 2014 co-edition of Almadía and the then National Council for Culture indicates. and the Arts.
“The perception of reality is bizarre, crazy, and is tinged with a black and caustic sense of humor.”
After his stay in our country, he continued his route through various cities in the United States, including New York, Chicago and Detroit. Before him he was in France, Spain and Cuba. Less than four years later, the poet, playwright and propagandist took his life with a shot to the heart on April 14, 1930, at the age of 36.
“At the end of his days, as communism moved away from his ideals, the poet lost his illusion for the Soviet dawn.
Disenchanted, he committed suicide before his 37th birthday. His funeral was a massive act. Vladimir Mayakovski represented the never-fulfilled change of a nation where poets often make a heroic commitment to history.”
The philosopher and translator Alfredo Gurza made the introduction to some of the poems in a number of the Reading Material collection of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he highlighted: “We must be clear that Mayakovski himself defined himself as a communist that he wrote poems, and that his personal tragedy is the tragedy of the generation of fighters that gave birth to the Soviet Union.
He considers that “shedding light on Mayakovsky’s poetry then implies the enormous task of learning from him.
Learn in their verses, in their plays, in their movie scripts, in their posters and in their essays. Mayakovski’s lessons forge poets: makers of language who are also makers of a new life”.
Recognized as the national poet when the Bolshevik revolution triumphed, his figure was praised, some distortedly consider, during the Stalin era.
The city in Georgia, where he was born on July 19, 1893, bore his name between 1940 and 1990, which changed after the independence of this territory from the Soviet Union. He is still greatly admired in Russia, for his poetry and his socialist posters.
From a young age, Vladimir adhered to the communist cause, for which he was imprisoned. Dedicated to reading in prison, it was there that he became an important representative of the futurist movement, in whose manifesto, A slap to public taste, he participated in 1912.
The writer Juan Bonilla makes a detailed sketch of the biography of “one of the most charismatic figures of the Russian avant-garde” in the novel Prohibido enter sin pantalones (Seix Barral, 2013). In 1925 he began his journey that started from Moscow and lasted seven months.
In Mexico, in addition to representatives of the Russian embassy and the Mexican Communist Party, Rivera was the host who showed him part of our country, and the murals he was doing in the Ministry of Public Education.
In his diary, Vladimir Mayakovski described the muralist narrative as “a virgin paradise with free labor, ancient customs, a corn festival, dances of the spirit of death and life, fruit and flower offerings.”