mayakovsky's: the bedbug

Communism    Futurism        Communism and Futurism Pluses       Mayakovsky Vs. The Collective

Mayakovsky wrote the Bedbug in 1928 as what now looks like a prelude to his suicide two years later. His  personal sense of hopelessness in his struggle to reconcile his radical personality and art with an artistically conservative post revolution regime is felt quite poignantly at the end of the play when the protagonist Prisypkin says,

In The Bedbug Mayakovsky explores the frustration and confusion expressed in this statement. The first half of the play takes place in Mayakovsky's present and satirizes Prisypkin as the sell out who uses his proletarian status to climb the social ranks. The second part, which takes place 50 years in the future where a cryogenically preserved Prisypkin awakens to a communist “utopia”, is where Mayakovsky's voice is really heard, for it is here that he exposes his  vulnerabilities by embodying himself in Prisypkin. In this future all personal vices and idiosyncrasies have been eliminated and each individual's life belongs to the collective. The fact that the bourgeois Prisypkin turns out to be the only individual element in this future satirizes the potential dehumanization that Mayakovsky seems to feel is developing under the bolsheviks.
         Mayakovsky has essentially created an experiment in context where times change and Prisypkin is the fixed variable. In the past we despise Prisypkin's vices but in the future we value them because they seem to be the only remnant of human spirit left in this new world order. In a way it is as if Mayakovsky is saying “I would rather be what I most despise than be made into the kind of automaton.” Despite this sentiment, however, that Mayakovsky would never consciously become the kind of sell out bourgeoisie that  Prisypkin represents in the first half of the play. So where does this leave us in terms of Mayakovsky's ideology? Where is he in terms of communism at this point? Technology certainly plays a role in the dehumanization portrayed in the future, so where is he in terms of futurism in this play? Finally, what is the internal result of this struggle between the poet-playwright's personal objectives and the Bolshevik's greater political objectives?  Let's take a look....
....through the eyes of The Bedbug....
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