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Vladimir Mayakovsky’S Agit-Semitism, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

Images of Jewishness as ethnic, cultural, and biblical categories in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s works are both plentiful and understudied. The present article attempts to bridge this gap while exploring the mechanisms that guide the poet’s responses to anti-Semitism. I begin by focusing on the function of the Exodus story in Stikhi ob Amerike(Verses about America), and then move to Mayakovsky’s “agitational” works: his collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle(Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems ““Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)” (“Jew [To Comrades from OZET],” 1926) and “‘Zhid’” (“‘Yid’,” 1928). I argue that, while Mayakovsky continues the established …