Publication Date
2021
Description
It is surprising that the poet whose self-proclaimed mission was to give city streets a language turned to publicizing farming collectives. No less noteworthy is the poet of internationalism working on the ethnocentric Crimea project of advertising Jewish agrarian communities. This paper addresses Mayakovsky’s collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle (Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems ““Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)” (“Jew [To Comrades from OZET],” 1926) and “‘Zhid’” (“‘Yid’,” 1928). I argue that in these works the poet reshuffles the svoi-chuzhoi dichotomy. While using the Moses story of exile and liberation, the poet both domesticates the Jew through features of the dominant culture and marginalizes the anti-Semite by ascribing to him the pejorative markers of the Jewish stereotype. One of the main purposes of the Exodus subtext is to expand Mayakovsky’s zone of “our-ness” while making the Promised Land and the lexicon of Zionism “our own.”
Journal
East European Jewish Affairs
Volume
51
Issue
2-3
First Page
212
Last Page
231
Department
Russian Studies
Second Department
Languages, Cultures & Linguistics
DOI
doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2022.2088361
Recommended Citation
Lavine, Ludmila. "Mayakovsky on the Land." (2021) : 212-231.