Unsettling Things: Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva’s Attachment to Everyday Objects

This article studies representations of everyday life and objects in poetic works by the Russian poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva. Byt, a concept that refers to quotidian practices and the hardened routines of everyday life, has been used to understand the manner of Russian writers’ negotiations with everyday reality. After surveying some prominent scholarly views on byt, this article assesses the legacy of impressionism with particular attention to how it informs aesthetic representations of the everyday. Since impressionism provided stylistic foundations for many modernist and avant-garde movements, a critical assessment of its legacy proves useful for understanding the affective and aesthetic orientations developed toward everyday objects in works by Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva. An investigation of how both poets transfigure everyday objects and invest them with spiritual significance reveals the nature of their attachment to objects. The article pays particular attention to how the poets resist Marxian notions of fetishism by translating their objectual negotiations into a constructivist process for the poetic self. As part of this process of self-fashioning, the poets develop novel ways of reorganizing the everyday through a subversion of the metonymic and metaphorical axes of description. The article then offers detailed analyses of Mayakovsky’s play, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, and Tsvetaeva’s poem, “Desk.” In both, everyday objects become thresholds of intersubjectivity. They are at once autonomous entities and metonymic projections of the poets’ bodies. Compared to Mayakovsky's restless prophetic voice, which orchestrates ritualistic performances for objectual presentations of his body and psyche, Tsvetaeva’s poem seeks more absorbed and intimate immersion in her object, the writing table, which records traces of an embodied poetic self and its struggle to restructure cultural constructions of the everyday.