Cityscapes Painted in poetry: Impressionist Echoes in Mayakovsky"s Early Poetry

Mayakovsky was a painter before he was a poet, and poetry and painting were not separate genres in his life and work. Painting was an important part of Mayakovsky&quots life before he was a poet, and it was a central theme and form in his early works as a member of Futurism. Furthermore, the influence of painting on his works is profound, as his early pictorial awareness led to posters, advertisements, books, and other works in active collaboration with innovative artists of the time from the post-revolutionary period through the 1920s.<br/> Impressionism, a «revolution» in European painting in the 19th century, and Post-Impressionism in the early 20th century had an overwhelming influence on the Russian avant-garde, leading to the formation of Cubo-futurism, a movement in which the principles of painting penetrated into poetry. Mayakovsky himself referred to the period 1912-1913, when Futurism was at its height, as his “period of formal work and language acquisition.” In this paper, I examine Mayakovsky&quots perception of painting as reflected in his early poetry published during this period, as well as how the innovative mainstream of European painting from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism was reflected in his poetic forms and themes, and through the intertextuality of poetry and painting, I seek to collectively identify the futurist poetic character of Mayakovsky&quots early works.