ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three key tropes in Markish’s early work, each of which reveals ways Markish engages with, and differentiates himself from, the futurists. It examines Markish’s radical focus on the present, a poetics that reflects the futurists’ dissociation of the present from past forms and past social values. The chapter addresses Markish’s use of Christian imagery to illustrate the suffering wrought by war, pogroms, and revolution. It describes Markish’s formation of his more mature expressionist voice, which, even as he gains distance from futurist aesthetics, bears a striking resemblance to that of the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Markish’s emulation of Mayakovsky could only have been encouraged by the Russian poet’s immense popularity in Warsaw, where Markish lived for a time, having moved from Kiev in the 1920s. Gennady Estraikh writes that, in the 1920s, ‘Markish lived in Poland and toured there and in other countries as a revolutionary firebrand, a Yiddish answer to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’.
