ABSTRACT
Maiakovsky’s suicide is in one way more symbolic than Kuznetzov’s of the state of the arts and the letters under the Stalin. For Maiakovsky was not only engaged in the “social work” under the direction of the party, but also in a very lusty shouting that such work is what it means to be a poet. Maiakovsky was a mighty and big-striding animal— physically more like a trained-down prize-fighter than a poet—and with a bold shout and dominating wit and nerves of the leather. The obvious fact that Maiakovsky failed as a leader of the proletarian culture because he was a momentous poet, and momentous poets are not institutions for cherishing other people’s poetry, is another simple element of reality that can hardly sift through that the conception of it which occupies the points of ingress to the brain of the dialectic materialist.
