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Mayakovsky On The Land, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

It is surprising that the poet whose self-proclaimed mission was to give city streets a language turned to publicizing farming collectives. No less noteworthy is the poet of internationalism working on the ethnocentric Crimea project of advertising Jewish agrarian communities. This paper addresses Mayakovsky’s 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 in these works the poet reshuffles the svoi-chuzhoi dichotomy. While using the Moses story of exile and liberation, the poet both domesticates the Jew …