14 quotes
Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.
Shrine or Factory? (1918)
On the pavement
of my trampled soul
the steps of madmen
weave the prints of rude crude words.
If you wish,
I shall grow irreproachably tender:
not a man, but a cloud in trousers!
The Cloud in Trousers (1915)
Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life.
We're quits: stupid to draw up a list
of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains.
No gray hairs streak my soul,
no grandfatherly fondness there!
I shake the world with the might of my voice,
and walk – handsome,
twentytwoyearold.
The Cloud in Trousers (1915)
A rhyme's
…
a barrel of dynamite.
A line is a fuse
that's lit.
The line smoulders,
the rhyme explodes –
and by a stanza
a city
is blown to bits.
A Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes about Poetry (1926)
Love
for us
is no paradise of arbors —
to us
love tells us, humming,
that the stalled motor
of the heart
has started to work
again.
Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostorov on the Nature of Love (1928)
Tramp squares with rebellious treading!
Up heads! As proud peaks be seen!
In the second flood we are spreading
Every city on earth will be clean.
Our March (1917)
I understand the power and the alarm of words –
Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes,
but those which make coffins break from bearers
and on their four oak legs walk right away.
In parade deploying
the armies of my pages,
I shall inspect
the regiments in line.
Heavy as lead,
my verses at attention stand,
ready for death
and for immortal fame.
Hey, you!
Heaven!
Off with your hat!
I am coming!
Not a sound.
The universe sleeps,
its huge paw curled
upon a star-infested ear.
The Cloud in Trousers (1915)
I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood –
what then?,
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.
Agitprop
sticks
in my teeth too,
and I'd rather
compose
romances for you –
more profit in it
and more charm.
But I
subdued
myself,
setting my heel
on the throat
of my own song.
Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Disputed to Vladimir Mayakovsky in The Political Psyche (1993)