A Cloud in Trousers

The subject of Mayakovsky's unrequited love was Maria Denisova whom he met in Odessa during the Futurists' 1913 tour.[4] Born in 1894 in Kharkov to a poor peasant family, Maria at the time resided with the family of her sister (whose husband Filippov was an affluent man) and was an art school student, learning sculpture. Vasily Kamensky described Denisova as "a girl of a rare combination of qualities: good looks, sharp intellect, strong affection for all things new, modern and revolutionary."[5]

Maria's sister Yekaterina Denisova, who ran a domestic literary salon, invited the three now famous young Futurist poets, Mayakovsky, Burlyuk and Kamensky, to their house. Prior to this Maria and Vladimir met three weeks earlier at the Mir Iskusstva exhibition, but that was a fleeting acquaintance. Mayakovsky fell in love instantly and gave her the nickname Gioconda, in reference to the Mona Lisa.[note 1]

The intensity of Mayakovsky's passion was unbearable. According to Kamensky, he suffered immensely and was hectically rushing things, caring not for what he thought to be the girl's indecisiveness and fussiness. It looked as if he completely misunderstood the situation: Maria (unlike her sister) was just not impressed either by the Futurists, or by Mayakovsky. Indecisive she was anything but; "on the contrary, her later life proved to be the chain of extraordinary events, triggered by most daring, reckless decisions", according to biographer Mikhaylov.[5]

In the mid-1910s Maria Denisova lived in Switzerland with her first husband, then, as the latter moved to England, returned to the Soviet Russia. She fought in the Russian Civil War and married the Red Army general Efim Shchadenko whom she divorced in the late 1920s. Denisova became an established Soviet monumentalist sculptor, one of her better known works being "The Poet" (1927), Mayakovsky's head set in plaster. In the late 1930s she fell into obscurity and stopped seeing friends, one of her two daughters, Alice, having fled to England. Denisova committed suicide in 1944 by jumping from the tenth floor.[6]

Mayakovsky started working on the poem (which he said was born "as a letter, while on a train") in early 1914. He finished it in July 1915, in Kuokkala. Speaking at the Krasnaya Presnya Komsomol Palace in 1930, Mayakovsky remembered: "It started as a letter in 1913/14 and was first called "The Thirteenth Apostle". As I came to see the censors, one of them asked me: Dreaming of doing a forced labour, eh? 'By no means, I said, no such plans at all.' So they erased six pages, as well as the title. Then, there's the question about where the title has come from. Once somebody asked me how could I combine lyricism with coarseness. I replied: 'Simple: you want me rabid, I'll be it. Want me mild, and I'm not a man, a cloud in trousers.'"[7]

The first extracts from the poem (part of the Prologue and Part 4) appeared in the Strelets (Sagittarius) compilation in February 1915. Several stanzas were published as extensive quotes in Zhurnal Zhurnalov (The Journals' Journal) by Mayakovsky himself in his article "On the Many Mayakovskys". In February 1915 at the Strelets'-related party in the Stray Dog artistic basement featured Mayakovsky reciting fragments of it to the audience, Maxim Gorky among the guests. In July 1915 he read some of it to Gorky personally.

"Travelled to Mustamyaki. M.Gorky [was here]. Read him the Cloud's fragments. So moved to tears Gorky was as to soak my vest. The degree to which I upset him made me almost proud. It was only later that I learned he'd been sobbing this way upon every poetical vest coming his way", Mayakovsky wrote in his autobiography. According to actress Maria Andreyeva, Gorky (who hated the Futurists) admired Mayakovsky. Still, he was taken aback by "the extreme loudness" of his poetic voice. "Once he told him, 'Look, here's just [your] sunrise, and there you are, running out wild to give this enormous yell. How are you to keep it up? The day is long, and there is a lot for you to live through."[7]

Structurally, the poem is closer to diptych. In Part I the protagonist is waiting for his love, Maria, in a hotel. She finally appears and informs him of her engagement. He remains visibly unperturbed, but internally suffers an explosion of destructive emotions and furious metaphors:

Now I'll go and play.

The fiery curve of my brow flawless.

A house that was destroyed by flame

Is sometimes occupied by the homeless.

Parts II and III contain brutal attacks on the contemporary poetry, praises of the Man who "holds the conveyors of the world in the palm of his hand", and prophesizes the revolution and the emergence of the new, freed mankind. The protagonist, a self-defined "preaching, thrashing Zarathustra", sees himself as a new man–God and enters the "tongueless streets" to pronounce his own Sermon on the Mount.

Where the human eye fails in confusion,

The hungry hordes loom:

Wearing the crown of thorns of revolutions

Year 16 brings doom.

Part IV sees the protagonist's return to being tormented by unrequited love, which eventually brings him to the act of Deicide, as he blames God for creating an unhappy world, where unanswered love is possible:

Almighty, you gave us an assortment:

A head and a pair of hands to exist.

Why couldn’t you make it so, without torment,

We could kiss, kiss, and kiss?!”

He sees Love in the modern world as doomed, being destroyed by art, religion and the society itself.[8]

The theme of madness that first appeared in Part III ("The thought of psychiatric wards came and curtained my brain in despair" and "This is all madness. Nothing with happen.") develops into a mental breakdown of the protagonist in the Finale, which is followed by emotional exhaustion and silence.