The futurists who branded and rejected symbolism threw overboard, along with mysticism, an arsenal of symbolist themes, images, and techniques, including the motif of loneliness, which was mostly alien to them, and if it sometimes flashed, it was either for self-affirmation, or original associations, or shocking: "I'm going / alone to cry, / that policemen are crucified at the crossroads" and "And I am / on earth / alone /the herald of future truths" (Mayakovsky), " I am a white raven, I am alone..." (Khlebnikov), "How can I, a lone wolf, / not call out to distant cubs" (Aseev), "I am alone in my task, And because I am alone, I prepare the flabby world for surrender, Weaving a wreath on my coffin" (Severyanin), " Am I all alone in the world, - / Ready to cry on occasion... "(Pasternak - on behalf of the "floating garden"). B. Pasternak and in mature years he will define loneliness as "rococo", that is, a property of distant and refined antiquity, and only at a later age will the "fate of loners" become closer to him: "I am alone, everything is drowning in pharisaism "(Hamlet), and he will formulate an aphoristic judgment - "And everything is always full of loneliness in the heart and nature" (Autumn, 1949).
But perhaps the most ingenious formula of loneliness came out of the young Mayakovsky: "I am lonely, like the last eye of a man going to the blind" (1913). Is it because he suppressed this feeling in himself, tried to seem like a "block", later - "agitator, loudmouth, leader" and stepped "on the throat of his own song"? (It is interesting that Tsvetaeva perceived him as such, while Akhmatova saw him differently: "lonely and often dissatisfied" - "Mayakovsky in 1913".) This formula could not be surpassed by the "Chairman of zemshar" V. Khlebnikov, who compared himself to a lonely actor, then to a lonely doctor: "I'm a single doctor / In the madhouse / Sang his medicine songs "(1992) and more often than other residents of Budetly experienced the sadness of loneline ...
Read more