Have you seen
a dog lick the hand that thrashed it?!

The five stars are for the poetry. the play is a satire which endures because of its all too human kernel. The verse is loud, a clamoring. Metallic. I appreciate a verb like shock in this instance. Current is also a valuable word when considering these riveting lines of Mayakovsky. Seeking council the other day I went to my Director--who sighed from over steaming bowl of noodles and said, No wisdom. She could use some Mayakovsky about now. My crazy sister noted the other night on social media that Hollywood should leave politics alone. These poems couldn't help her. ( )

This is a fantastic collection of the range and skill of Mayakovsky's writings. ( )

Mayakovsy's poems are filled with depressing lines, like, "I love to see children die..." When I first read this line in Russian, I thought I had the second verb wrong. Nope. I sure hope I'm missing his irony, but I'm happy to miss it. His verse is self-absorbed, depressing and narrow: so he'd make a great American poet, the male equivalent of Sylvia Plath, except he didn't try to kill his kids. But the poem I cite suggests he would have, had he the chance.
He was a satirist of society, so elevated by Stalin to litarary sainthood. His play Bedbug, here, has quite a bit of slapstick--about marriage between a heiress and a working stiff, then futuristic robots. The one passage I enjoyed was M's use of committee-meeting language at the nuptials: "This marriage is now convened."
Occasionally there are revealing period-reflections, for instance, communist newspapers from all over the globe--Chicago, Indonesia--report the nuptials.
But the Bedbug ages pretty well, esp in the Max Hayward trans. After all, it's from 1930, but seems more like the fifties. Wonderful final scenes of proletarian man on exhibit in a zoo, with a bedbug--both exotica in the future. ( )

A classic of early-Soviet literature. "The Bedbug" is a terrific story and offers great insight into the politicized literature of the era. ( )