Marketing, Mayakovksy Style
When Creative and Commercial Communications Collide

Soviet activist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, like Frenchman Charles Baudelaire before him understood the meaning of the poetic market. They both understood that in order to get their poems (and thusly themselves) noticed, they could not afford to pull any punches. Though the two political radicals shared a common understanding in the importance of audience, they do not use this knowledge in the same way. While Baudelaire primarily uses his poetry to create an everlasting monument for himself, Mayakovsky used many of his poems to promote the cause of the Soviet Union. Two of the poems in which he does this are Lines on a Soviet Passport and Screaming My Head Off.

Baudelaire, most obviously in his introductory poem to Les Fleurs du Mal, entitled To the Reader, uses the tactic of directly and purposely insulting his readers. He offends and insults to the point where the audience has to turn away in disgust, but then pushes even further, which causes the readers to continue reading. Baudelaire banks on the fact that his audience will be intrigued, almost aroused by the idea that he insults them with such openness, even though he insults their very being right from the first line, stamping the readers as having the characteristics of “Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust” and even takes shots at their jobs, “How cheerfully we crawl back into the mire.” Calling a person’s occupation mundane isn’t very diplomatic, but for Baudelaire, it works.

Mayakovsky, on the other hand, takes a more benevolent tone with his audience. As one of the finest artistic supporters of the Russian Revolution, in fact creating a countless array of revolutionary posters, and as a creator of the Cubo-Futurist movement, Mayakovsky took it upon himself to act as a sort of public relations man for the groups to which he belonged. Lines on a Soviet Passport and Screaming My Head Off each serve as artistic public service announcements. The former lending itself to the causes of Communism and Nationalism, while the latter deals in part with the Futurist movement as well as Communism.

It is no coincidence that the two poems serve almost as manifestos in and of themselves, given their overlying topic of discussion. This call to action makes Mayakovsky’s poems serve almost as the “evil twin” of Baudelaire’s poem. But while Baudelaire’s To the Reader is simply a self-gratifying rant aimed at getting people to read his poetry, to read him, Mayakovsky’s works serve the purpose of getting an audience to read and sympathize with the causes he writes about.

However, there is yet another likely reason that he chooses to talk about himself in this way: He is selling himself in yet another way. Rather than use the psychology of insult like Baudelaire, he uses the power of suggestion. He is counting on the fact that because he says that the readers (or, "The people of the future") will want to learn about him, that they will take that step and see what it is that he stands for. Doing this, the readers will discover the motivation and necessity for Communism, and undoubtedly some of them will join the party, or at least agree with their ideals. But even if the readers aren’t drawn in just by his introduction, Mayakovsky does something that salesmen are famous for doing. He gives a personal anecdote to further his cause along. It is not difficult to figure out where his personal twist begins, as he writes it exactly this way: "Here’s my story:/I’m a health inspector/And water boy/Swimming in blood before /I was wet behind the ears." While writing in this manner might be bad for analysts, in that it completely destroys room for interpretation, by the same token it is good for the passive audience at the same time. But it is precisely because it is straightforward that it works so well to persuade the target market. Even though it is rather ironic to think of a political upheaval as something simple or unconscious, it is sometimes better for a salesman to appeal to the lowest common denominator. But on the other hand, that’s one goal of Communism. Furthermore, Mayakovsky tries to tell his audience that the ideas he holds will live on and quite literally hold water throughout all eternity. "My poems will fly over the ears of our time… My poems will come… hard and heavy as a giant jaw cut out of rock/The way an aqueduct/goes on forever." By including this analogy, he means that not only will the audience he is presently addressing be influenced by and take notice of his poems, but so will all who come after the audience. By allowing for the common reader to understand his message without having to labor with metaphor and wordplay, Mayakovsky makes his message that more palatable to his audience. Using skills that are typically absent from poetry, he has successfully marketed and sold his product to his customers.

 The other poem, Lines on a Soviet Passport tries a more direct form of marketing, if one can call it that. It relies heavily on the use of Soviet propaganda. Even though the advertising styles are different, the two poems are linked in that they both give an immense impression of a heartfelt manifesto.

In Lines, the poetic voice really does give a narration, telling the audience about his experience on a train ride from somewhere to somewhere, although from the words Mayakovsky uses, one can infer that the train is not that of Russian origin. The destinations do not seem to matter other than from a logistical point of view, whatever they truly may be. One could argue that the image of being on a train is a symbol of a journey from one political state to another, an argument that isn’t so far fetched, given that the poem was written a little more than a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, in 1929.

Mayakovsky here again appeals to the common man, as travel by train was a familiar image for most of the people he wished to attract. In the poem he writes, “For all of me/All papers/Can go plumb to hell/All, that is,/But just one/That I own.” This instance of moderately aggressive behavior toward the some of the established norms of regulation is meant to stoke the fires that are brewing up inside the souls of a steadily rising number of Russian commoners. This piece of paper, as Mayakovsky conveniently reveals as his Soviet passport, represents the only thing that Mayakovsky, holds dear to him. Mayakovsky also wants to get his audience to believe that the passport should be the only important document in their lives as well. He makes this evident by centering the entire poem around how the passports of different nations get different reactions (“But there’s always/The deepest respect/For the British,” “Then,/Scraping and bowing/As if getting a tip,/They’ll receive/An American’s/Book,” etc.).

The image of the train official is also an interesting one to look at. The official represents the oppressive presence of the bourgeois class, he exists as a focal point for Mayakovsky’s audience. Mayakovsky, by giving the aforementioned images, tries to make the official out to be a monster who unduly renders judgement. He tries to get the audience to see that it is wrong for one person to be able to have complete control over the entire train; that it is wrong for one power-mongering ruler to preside over an entire nation.

The poem also carries with it an incredible sense of nationalistic pride that borders on zealotry and with that air again comes the sense of pomposity. By saying that “But suddenly something/Pains/The bureaucrat’s pus” Mayakovsky is saying that, even though he had previously mentioned that there are several on the train who are not in the official’s favor, being a Soviet is by far the worst in the eyes of the official. He makes the audience believe that the ruling class is against them even more than it is against the other nations. He tries to get the audience believing that the new Communist way is the most important precisely because it causes the most fuss. The clearest evidence for this lies at the end of the poem, where Mayakovsky writes: “Go on and read it!/You’re right to be/jealous;/I am a/Citizen/Of the USSR.”

Poetry has served as a popular form of social commentary and call to action, and Mayakovsky’s works exemplify not only that notion, but also the notion that poetry is the opium of the people, an idea that runs parallel to Marx’s idea about the function of religion.