OUR MARCH
By:
April 8, 2025
A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.
Beat the squares with the tramp of rebels!
Higher, ranges of haughty heads!
We’ll wash the world with a second deluge,
Now’s the hour whose coming it dreads.
Too slow, the wagon of years,
The oxen of days — too glum.
Our god is the god of speed,
Our heart — our battle-drum.
Is there gold diviner than ours?
What wasp of a bullet us can sting?
Songs are our weapons, our power of
powers,
Our gold — our voices; just hear us sing!
Meadow, lie green on the earth!
With silk our days for us line!
Rainbow, give colour and girth
To the fleet-foot steeds of time.
The heavens grudge us their starry
glamour.
Bah! Without it our songs can thrive.
Hey there, Ursus Major, clamour
For us to be taken to heaven alive!
Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart, step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals!
— 1918. Translated by Dorian Rottenberg.
Mayakovsky co-founded the Futurist movement, whose early collection was called, significantly, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912). Gorky remarked that while Futurism perhaps did not exist, a great poet did: Mayakovsky.
Mayakovsky’s 1929 play The Bedbug is a work of Radium Age proto-sf.
His despondency in personal affairs as much as his disillusionment with politics led him to shoot himself. Because he was both revered and reviled, his death held profound though various meaning for everyone. Tens of thousands of people attended his funeral. Mayakovsky was canonized by Stalin, who said about him: “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our time. Indifference to his poetry is a crime.” This eulogy was, in Pasternak’s view, Mayakovsky’s second death.
Notes from Russian Poetry: An Anthology, chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1927). The translation here, though, is not the translation from that book.
In 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, ed. Boris Dralyuk, we read:
In 1911, after enrolling at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Mayakovsky met David Burlyuk (1882-1967), who drew him into his circle of innovative young poets, including Khlebnikov, the poet-aviator Vasily Kamensky (1884-1961) and Alexey Kruchenykh (1886-1968), who pioneered a “transrational” poetics called zaum. That same year the “Hylaeans”, as they dubbed themselves, would issue a resounding ‘Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ — a manifesto urging its readers to “Toss Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on, and so on, from the steamship of modernity”. Over the next six years, this volatile group — the most artistically diverse and accomplished of myriad factious Futurist outfits-would splinter, then reform as the Cubo-Futurists, then splinter again. Yet despite their internal squabbles, they never lost sight of their true foe: the petty philistine consumer, the repulsive bourgeois. Their aesthetic enemy was, conveniently enough, the class enemy of the Bolsheviks, who were just as single-minded in their hatred. And yet, although the core Hylaeans met the February Revolution with unbridled fervour, the Bolshevik coup induced a more ambiguous reaction.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.