Analysis of the poem "cloud in pants". “Cloud in Pants”: analysis of the poem Characteristics of the main characters

During a tour of Russia, a group of futurists visited Odessa. V. Mayakovsky met Masha Denisova, fell in love, but the love remained unrequited. The poet had a hard time experiencing his unrequited love. On the train, leaving Odessa, Mayakovsky read fragments of the poem “A Cloud in Pants” to his friends.

The poem was completed with a dedication to Lilya Brik “To you, Lilya.” The original title of the poem, “The Thirteenth Apostle,” was perceived by censors as blasphemy against Christianity; in addition, it was indicated that in the poem Mayakovsky combined “lyricism and great rudeness.” In response, the poet promised to be “impeccably gentle, not a man, but a cloud in his pants.” This phrase served as the basis for the new name. The 1915 edition had a subtitle - tetraptych (a work in 4 parts). Each part expressed denial: “Down with your love!”, “Down with your art!”, “Down with your system!”, “Down with your religion!”

Researchers call the poem “Cloud in Pants” the pinnacle of V.V. Mayakovsky’s pre-revolutionary creativity, in which the theme of love is combined with themes of the importance of the poet and poetry in society, attitudes to art, and religion. The poem contains lyrical and satirical notes, which gives the work a dramatic sound. Overall, this is a love poem. The introduction emphasizes the motives of the lyrics and the reasons for the tragedy of V.V. Mayakovsky (the opposition of the lyrical hero to the crowd, the “fat”).

The first part of the poem is a cry of discontent: “Down with your love!” What lies behind this denial? The lyrical hero is waiting to meet Maria, but she is not there. The heart of the lyrical hero is in melancholy and anxiety, this is expressed through his vision of the world around him: the evening “passes away”, giving way to the darkness of the night; candelabra “laugh and neigh” at the back of the passing evening, etc. All this is presented in enlarged sizes, and the lyrical hero is a “wiry bulk”, a “block”. Maria comes and says: “You know, I’m getting married.” The poet compares the theft of his beloved with the theft of La Gioconda from the Louvre.

In the second part of the poem, Mayakovsky moves on to the theme of art, which does not want to see people suffering. Beggars and cripples (heroes of early lyrics) demand attention to themselves. Poets shun them, and Mayakovsky believes that they are “purer than the Venetian blue sky.”

The theme of the poet and poetry sounds more and more strongly. V. Mayakovsky opposes himself to the “poetics” - “...I am where the pain is, everywhere”; Addressing the “screaming poets,” he declares: “Down with your art!”

In the third part, the author denies the dominant system, which gives rise to distorted love and pseudo-art. The inhuman structure of the world gives rise to cruelty among people, as a result of which prisons, gallows, and insane asylums arise. A lyrical hero comes out to meet the strong with the slogan “Down with your system!”

In the fourth part - “Down with your religion!” - the poet clearly blasphemes and introduces atheistic motives. And again, as at the beginning of the poem, he turns to Mary. These are both pleas and reproaches; the poet is left with a bleeding heart.

Book materials used: Literature: textbook. for students avg. prof. textbook institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M.: "Academy", 2010

The third part

In the next part there is a repetition of the previous themes, but they are increasingly mixed with each other and resemble a stream of disparate associations. The lyrical hero sneers at the poet Severyanin. Again he is trying to rise above world history and culture, saying that he will lead Napoleon on a chain like a pug. He makes fun of the crowd, calling them “hungry, sweaty, stubby, covered in flea-filled dirt.” It is worth noting that the motif of “fat” people, fat, is repeatedly present. The Earth is also becoming fat. Again there is an exaltation of the lyrical hero and a mention of Jesus Christ, who “smells his soul of forget-me-nots.”

Fourth part

In this part the appeal to Mary appears again. He tells his beloved about how hard it is to educate the crowd and how badly people treat him:

How to squeeze a quiet word into their fattened ear?

begged by song,

hungry and ringing,

and I am a man, Maria,

coughed up by a consumptive night into a dirty hand"

The lyrical hero deifies his beloved, but she no longer needs these gifts:

I'm afraid to forget your name,

how the poet is afraid to forget

in the throes of the night a word born,

greatness equal to God.

your body

I will cherish and love,

like a soldier

cut off by war,

unnecessary,

takes care of his only leg.

do not want?

Do not want!

So - again

dark and depressing

I'll take the heart

drenched in tears,

like a dog,

which is in the kennel

a paw run over by a train"

In this final, fourth part, the lyrical hero already turns to God. God also rejects his ideas. The lyrical hero says that the angel standing next to God also knows nothing about true love. There is disappointment even in God: “I thought you were an all-powerful god, but you are a half-educated, tiny god.” He threatens the sky, which also rejects him, but no one hears him. “The Universe is sleeping with its huge ear resting on its paw” - no one in the Universe is able to understand the lyrical hero, everyone is sleeping. Feeling lonely.

Personal tragedy is shown against the backdrop of public

The lyrical hero is presented as emotional, capable of real feelings, selfless, living with complete dedication.

He strives to improve the world and opposes the current social system (where people live only by the thought of money, food, they have mundane interests)

However, no one understands him (neither his beloved, nor the crowd, nor God).

The lyrical hero is ready to sacrifice himself, even if he is not understood

However, at the end of the work he still remains alone

The idea for the poem “Cloud in Pants” (originally titled “The Thirteenth Apostle”) arose from Mayakovsky in 1914. The poet fell in love with a certain Maria Alexandrovna, a seventeen-year-old beauty, who captivated him not only with her appearance, but also with her intellectual aspiration for everything new, revolutionary. But love turned out to be unhappy. Mayakovsky embodied the bitterness of his experiences in poetry. The poem was completely completed in the summer of 1915. Po-et was not only the author, but also her lyrical hero. The work consisted of an introduction and four parts. Each of them had a certain, so to speak, private idea.
“Down with your love”, “Down with your art”, “Down with your system”, “Down with your religion” - “four cries of four parts” - this is how the essence of these ideas is very correctly and accurately defined by the author himself in the preface to the second edition poems.
At the beginning of the second chapter, the author defines his positions:
Praise me!
In the following lines we detect a certain “nihilism”:
I'm above everything that's done
I bet: “nihil” (nothing).
Everything is denied and destroyed, everything is rebuilt and remade in a new way. The denial continues:
I never want to read anything.
And then - the knowledge of life:
But it turns out -
before it starts to sing,
they walk for a long time, calloused from fermentation...
Next, the author is in the thick of the crowd:
The street silently poured flour...
And again - returning to a personal topic, the poet sets out his life principles.
In the second chapter, Mayakovsky expresses his protest openly, loudly and boldly. With exceptional clarity and inspiration, it expresses the hero’s determination when, addressing the “thousands of street people” following the poets “soaked in crying and sobbing,” he says:
Gentlemen!
Stop!
You are not beggars
you don't dare ask for handouts!
…
To us, the healthy ones,
with a fathom step,
you should not listen, but tear them -
their,
sucked free application
for every double bed!
The poet addressed the working people with a solemn sermon, speaking about their greatness and power:
We
with a face like a sleepy sheet,
with lips hanging like a chandelier,
We,
convicts of the leper colony city,
where gold and dirt showed leprosy, -
we are purer than the Venetian blue sky,
washed by the seas and suns at once.
…
I know,
the sun would darken if it saw
our souls are golden placers!
Listening carefully to the pulse of life, knowing that the feelings he expressed would not today or tomorrow become the self-consciousness of millions, the poet, through the lips of his lyrical hero, proclaimed:
I,
ridiculed by today's tribe,
how long
obscene joke,
I see time passing through the mountains,
which no one sees.
…
in the crown of thorns revolutions
the sixteenth year is coming.
And I am your forerunner...
Mayakovsky recognizes himself as the singer of humanity, oppressed by the existing system, which rises to fight. He calls himself the “screaming-lipped Zarathustra.” The poet speaks like a prophet on behalf of people oppressed by the city and the trade of stupid, meaningless labor. He ridicules the sweet, chirping poets who “boil” and “squeal” rhymes, while the writhing street “has nothing to shout or talk about.” With the sharp edges of hot lines, like bayonets, he storms the entire old order of life.
Mayakovsky speaks loudly and soulfully on behalf of those who hold the “natural belts of the world” in their five. Great love for a person is in every line of the second chapter. Not a single calmly spoken, not a single indifferent phrase. Mayakovsky's verse turned out to be powerful enough to convey the movement of worlds, to capture the subtlest movements of the heart and the dull silence of the Universe.
The second chapter is full of thought, fire, contempt, pain and anticipation of the future.
This foresight of the poet shortens the waiting period by a year. It seems to him that a revolution will break out already in 1916.
As for the artistic features of the second chapter of the poem “Cloud in Pants”, they are presented here very widely. The unusual thing about Mayakovsky’s poetry is that it is very active, and it is simply impossible not to perceive it in any way. We can say that his poems are poems of rallies and slogans. And in the second chapter we find examples of this: “Glorify me!”, “Lords! Stop! You are not beggars, you don’t dare ask for handouts!”
Mayakovsky's innovations are diverse. He completely changes established stereotypes in working on words and speech patterns. For example, the author takes a word and “refreshes” its primary meaning, creating a bright, detailed metaphor based on it. The result of this was such images as “bony cabs”, “plump taxis”.
The world of metaphors simply amazes with its imagination and diversity: “a scattering of souls”, “the eye breaks off”, “I will pull out the soul, trample”, “I burned out the souls...”. The comparisons are striking in their imagery: “a face like a washed-out sheet,” “with lips drooping like a chandelier,” and the poet compares himself to a “scabrous anecdote.”
By introducing neologisms, Mayakovsky achieves a memorable figurative characterization of phenomena and events: “unfrozen”, “boiled away”, “pedestrian”.
The poet deals with vocabulary in an unusually creative way: he “sifts”, “mixes” words, combining them in the most contrasting combinations. In the poem we will find combinations of “high” and “low” styles. “in the choirs of the Archangel’s Choir”, “let’s go eat”, “Faust”, “nail”, “Venetian azure”, “hungry hordes”. And sometimes there are deliberately rude, “reduced” images: “coughed up”, “bastard”...
In the second chapter of the poem we will find phrases-images, when literally behind one line there is a whole world, reproduced with amazing accuracy and versatility. For example, this is an image of a city:
puffing up, stuck across the throat,
plump taxis and bony cabs..
The rhythmic pattern of the second chapter is unique and very dynamic. Mayakovsky transforms and freely combines traditional poetic meters (iamb, trochee, anapest, etc.) with tonic verse, characteristic of folk poetry, creating a flexible, mobile structure of the verse.
And when -
after all!
coughed up a stampede into the square,
pushing away the porch that had stepped on my throat...
The rhythmic diversity and variation of a verse is not an end in itself, but a means of expressing the multifaceted content of the poem.
The features of the rhythmic structure of Mayakovsky’s verse include the complex movement of rhythm, the breakdown of the poetic line, and his famous “ladder”:
Listen!
Preaches
rushing and groaning,
today's scream-lipped Zarasthustra.
There is one known recollection of Mayakovsky’s comrade V. Kamensky. He wrote: “The success of the poem “Cloud in Pants” was so enormous that from that moment he immediately rose to the heights of brilliant mastery. Even the enemies looked at this height with awe and amazement.” I believe that this statement fully reflects the essence of this work, because Mayakovsky, imbued with a premonition of the coming revolution, spoke on behalf of enslaved humanity.

Concept The poem “Cloud in Pants” (original title “The Thirteenth Apostle”) originated from Mayakovsky in 1914. The poet fell in love with Maria Alexandrovna Denisova. However, love turned out to be unhappy. Mayakovsky embodied the bitterness of his experiences in poetry. The poem was completely completed in the summer of 1915.

Genre - poem.

Composition

The poem “Cloud in Pants” consists of an introduction and four parts. Each of them implements a specific, so to speak, private idea. The essence of these ideas was defined by Mayakovsky himself in the preface to the second edition of the poem: “Down with your love,” “down with your art,” “down with your system,” “down with your religion” - “four cries of four parts.”

Topics and problems

“Cloud in Pants” is a multi-themed and multi-problem work. Already in the introduction the theme of the poet and the crowd is stated. The main character, the poet, is contrasted with the crowd: the ideal image of the lyrical hero (“handsome, twenty-two years old”) contrasts sharply with the world of base things and images (“men, stored up like a hospital, / and women, worn out, like a proverb”). But if the crowd remains unchanged, then the lyrical hero changes before our eyes. He is either rude and harsh, “mad for meat,” “impudent and caustic,” or “impeccably gentle,” relaxed, vulnerable: “not a man, but a cloud in his pants.” This clarifies the meaning of the unusual title of the poem.

The first part, according to the poet’s plan, contains the first cry of discontent: “Down with your love.” The theme of love can be called central; the entire first and part of the fourth section is devoted to it.

The poem opens with tense anticipation: the lyrical hero is waiting to meet Mary. The waiting is so painful and intense that it seems to the hero that the candelabra are “laughing and neighing” in the back, “caressing” the doors, midnight is “cutting” with a knife, the raindrops are grimacing, “as if the chimeras of Notre Dame Cathedral are howling,” etc. Painful the wait lasts forever. The depth of the lyrical hero’s suffering is conveyed by an extended metaphor about the passing of the twelfth hour:

Midnight, rushing with a knife,

caught up

stabbed -

there he is!

The twelfth hour has fallen,

like the head of an executed man falling off the block.

Time, likened to a head falling from the block, is not just a fresh trope. It is filled with great internal content: the intensity of passions in the hero’s soul is so high that the usual but hopeless passage of time is perceived as his physical death. The hero “moans, writhes,” “soon he will tear his mouth out with a scream.” And finally, Maria comes and announces that she is getting married. The poet compares the harshness and deafeningness of the news with his own poem “Nate”. The theft of a loved one - with the theft of Leonardo da Vinci's "La Gioconda" from the Louvre. And himself - with the dead Pompeii. But at the same time, one is struck by the almost inhuman composure and calm with which the hero greets Maria’s message:

Well, come out.

Nothing.

I'll strengthen myself.

See how calm he is!

Like the pulse

dead man!

“Pulse of a Dead Man” is the finally, irretrievably dead hope for mutual feeling.

In the second part of the poem, the theme of love receives a new solution: we are talking about love lyrics, which predominate in Mayakovsky’s contemporary poetry. This poetry is concerned with glorifying “the young lady, and love, and the flower under the dew.” These themes are petty and vulgar, and the poets “boil, squealing in rhymes, some kind of brew from love and nightingales.” They are not concerned about people's suffering. Moreover, poets consciously flee from the street, they are afraid of the street crowd, its “pranks.” Meanwhile, the people of the city, according to the hero, are “purer than the Venetian blue sky, washed at once by the seas and the sun!”:

I know -

the sun would darken if it saw

our souls are rich in gold.

The poet contrasts the unviable art with the authentic, the screeching “poetics” with himself: “I am where the pain is, everywhere.”

In one of his articles, Mayakovsky stated: “Today’s poetry is the poetry of struggle.” And this journalistic formula found its poetic embodiment in the poem:

Take your hands out of your trousers -

take a stone, a knife or a bomb,

and if he has no hands -

come and fight with your forehead!

develops in the third part. Mayakovsky considered Severyanin’s work to be poetry that did not meet the requirements of the time, therefore the poem displays an impartial portrait of the poet:

And from cigar smoke

liqueur glass

Severyanin’s drunken face stretched out.

How dare you call yourself a poet

and, little gray one, chirp like a quail!

The poet, according to the lyrical hero, should be concerned not with the elegance of his poems, but with the power of their impact on readers:

Today

necessary

brass knuckles

cut into the world's skull!

In the third part of the poem, Mayakovsky rises to the denial of the entire ruling system, inhuman and cruel. The whole life of “fat” people is unacceptable for the lyrical hero. Here the theme of love takes on a new facet. Mayakovsky reproduces a parody of love, lust, debauchery, perversion. The whole earth appears as a woman who is depicted as “fat, like the mistress whom Rothschild fell in love with.” The lust of the “masters of life” is contrasted with true love.

The dominant system gives rise to wars, murders, executions, and “massacres.” Such a structure of the world is accompanied by robberies, betrayals, devastation, and “human mess.” It creates leper colonies-prisons and wards of insane asylums where prisoners languish. This society is corrupt and dirty. Therefore, “down with your system!” But the poet not only throws out this slogan-cry, but also calls the people of the city to open struggle, “to cut the world into the skull with brass knuckles,” raising “the bloody carcasses of meadowsweet farmers.” The hero confronts the powers that be, the “masters of life,” becoming the “thirteenth apostle.”

In the fourth part, the theme of God becomes the leading one. This topic has already been prepared by the previous parts, which indicate a hostile relationship with God, who indifferently observes human suffering. The poet enters into open war with God, he denies his omnipotence and omnipotence, his omniscience. The hero even resorts to insult (“tiny little god”) and grabs a shoe knife to cut open the “smelling of incense.”

The main accusation thrown at God is that he did not take care of happy love, “so that it would be possible to kiss, kiss, kiss without pain.” And again, as at the beginning of the poem, the lyrical hero turns to his Mary. Here there are prayers, and reproaches, and groans, and powerful demands, and tenderness, and oaths. But the poet hopes in vain for reciprocity. He is left with only a bleeding heart, which he carries, “like a dog... carries a paw that has been run over by a train.”

The finale of the poem is a picture of endless spaces, cosmic heights and scales. Ominous stars are shining, a hostile sky is rising. The poet is waiting for heaven to take off its hat to him in response to his challenge! But the universe is sleeping, with its huge ear resting on its paw with the pincers of the stars.

Let's consider one of the sensational works of V.V. Mayakovsky's 1915 "Cloud in Pants". Analysis of this poem reveals a protest against the art, system, ideology and morality of bourgeois society. His reproach for a society alien to him, in which there is no true love, begins with his worries about Maria Alexandrovna Denisova. The poet denounces the falsity of the current system in the country and, with aggressive irony, declares: “Mayakovsky is a “cloud in his pants.” The analysis of each part will be marked by a specific phrase of the poet.

"Down with your love"

The theme of betrayal is fully revealed in the poem “Cloud in Pants.” helps to understand how this betrayal spreads from the situation with Maria to all other aspects of life: he sees life differently, she reveals her rotten grin to him, and he does not want to live in a world where everyone pleases the other for the sake of entourage.

It is very noticeable that Mayakovsky in his poems is always varied and generous with various new derivative words that he creates from simple and familiar expressions. The imagery and ambiguity of words help to create a colorful picture in the imagination, enlivened by the reader’s consciousness.

So, for example, in a triptych a word of a similar structure is used: I mock - this word expresses aggression towards the reader himself: a representative of the bourgeois stand.

"Down with your art"

In the second part, Mayakovsky overthrows the idols of art that were popular during the period of his work on the poem “A Cloud in Pants.” Analysis of the ideas in this part reveals to the reader that true art is born with pain, that every person is capable of becoming the main creator in his life. The author comes up with interesting complex adjectives: “cry-lipped” and “golden-mouthed.” The word “new birth” in Mayakovsky also consists of two simple words “new” and “will give birth”; it is close in its meaning to the verb “renew” and means action.

"Down with your system"

Studying the work “Cloud in Pants” and analyzing it gives the reader a clear idea of ​​Mayakovsky’s negative attitude towards the political system that developed during the heyday of his poetic activity. In the third part, the following words became appropriate: “teared”, “loved”, “cursed”. The word “things” he invented characterizes belonging to things. Instead of the word “break,” Mayakovsky uses “break,” because it has an emphasis on a more appropriate action, meaning not only “break,” but also “break a hole in something.”

"Down with your religion"

In the fourth part of the work there are almost no complex author's words. The poet wanted to convey a specific meaning to the reader: he calls on Mary for love and, rejected, angers God, wanting to cut him open. For Mayakovsky, religion is false: God does not save, but only teases people with his idleness and laziness. Here, what became more important to the author was not the idea of ​​revolution, which he calls for in the previous parts of the poem, but his pain, his passion and experiences, expressed specifically and dynamically, like a cry after a blow. All these conclusions regarding the poem are indicated by semantic and lexical analysis. “A Cloud in Pants” is a truly historically valuable work that clearly and clearly expresses the revolutionary mood of that time.