Vladimir Mayakovsky had a long, tumultuous affair with Lilya Brik who was married to the poet’s publisher, Osip Brik. The threesome spent a lot of time together, but in 1923, during a two month separation from Lilya, the poet wrote Pro Eto (About this) and dedicated it to her. The poem is full of pain, anger, humor, lust, confusion and torment. In addition to writing about his love affair, Mayakovsky also mixes in his harsh opinions about Lenin and his supposed attempt to implement socialist policies in the Soviet Union. One of the most striking images that he uses in the first part of the poem is that of a telephone. It’s an important symbol for both the separation and connection with his lover. He begins the poem with:
She lies in bed.
While he…
On the table
is the telephone.
“He” and “she are my ballad.
Not terribly original you say.
And he continues his dramatic metaphor by focusing on a description of the workings of the telephone as sounds squeeze through its wires:
Squeezing miraculously
through the thin wire,
stretching the rim
of the mouthpiece funnel,
a thunder of ringings
bangs through the silence,
then the telephone pours out its tinkling lava.
A screaming,
a ringing,
shots slammed into the wall
tried to blow it up.
The juxtaposition of silence with the noise of the phone reminded me of a passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in which he describes talking on the telephone for the first time and the person to whom he speaks is his beloved grandmother. The shock of hearing her voice without seeing her elicits an unexpected emotional response:
And because that voice appeared to me to have altered in its proportions from the moment that it was a whole, and reached me thus alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps indeed it had never been so sweet as it was now, for my grandmother, thinking of me as being far away and unhappy, felt that she might abandon herself to an outpouring of tenderness which, in accordance with her principles of upbringing, she usually restrained and kept hidden. It was sweet, but also how sad it was, first of all, on account of its very sweetness, a sweetness drained almost—more than any but a few human voices can ever have been—of every element of hardness, of resistance to others, of selfishness! Fragile by reason of its delicacy, it seemed constantly on the verge of breaking, of expiring in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone beside me, seen without the mask of her face, I noticed it for the first time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime.
After this phone conversation the narrator immediately packs his things and runs how to his grandmother. When she is sick, he understands the severity of her illness when her voice changes and he can no longer understand her. This tension that exists between hearing the loved one’s voice yet being separated is present in Mayakovsky’s poem as well. As I watch the grim news with people dying alone from this horrible, invasive virus, it’s become evident that the only way to say goodbye to sick loved ones is through a phone call. Once again, the phone becomes a symbol for a state of limbo— somewhere between closeness and separation.
Finally, both Proust and Mayakovsky both suffer from heart sickness, but only Mayakovsky succumbs to it by committing suicide. There are haunting passages in Pro Eto that foreshadow his tragic end:
If I sacrificed a day
I sacrificed a year
To this dreary nonsense.
I too almost succumbed
to this delirium.
It ate up my life
with its domestic murk
and the said:
“Go on, jump
from the first floor,
the pavement’s waiting.”
In 1923, after its original publication in the journal LEF, Pro Eto was presented as a separate edition with photomontages done by Aleksandr Rodchenko. Mayakovsky, Lilya and telephones prominently appear in many of the photos.
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