Aftertext of Invectives in the Poetic Attacks of V. Mayakovsky and S. Yesenin in 1924

This article deals with a historical and literary study of V. Mayakovsky’s poetic attack on S. Yesenin represented by his For the Jubilee poem (1924) and Yesenin’s response to Mayakovsky in his In the Caucasus poem (September 1924). In literary criticism, both invectives are represented as a literary fact of the exchange of derogatory figurative characteristics by the poets, caused by their desire to hurt their opponent as much as possible with the word. It is noted that the interpretations of invectives established in scholarship are illogical and do not take into account their dialogic nature. The author suggests identifying the semantic connections of invectives that a priori should be present between the attack and the response to it in a single dialog field formed at the intersection of the poems For the Jubilee and In the Caucasus as a literary fact of the long-term creative rivalry between Mayakovsky and Yesenin. The author’s attribution of the boundaries of Mayakovsky’s invective in the poem For the Jubilee, represented by an explicit part and by one hidden from prying eyes, clarifies the dialogic nature of Yesenin’s reactive invective. In his In the Caucasus, through a mirroring image, Yesenin expresses a response to the attack of the literary opponent. The hidden content of both invectives is decoded by an alcohol-related code, which the rival poets resort to in order to disparage not only the creative, but also the personal merits of each other, indicating the intensity of their creative confrontation, which has gone beyond the boundaries of a purely literary dispute. The study enriches contemporary literary scholarship by offering a fresh perspective on the nature of the creative rivalry between Mayakovsky and Yesenin, while also offering prospects for further exploration of the complex relationship between these two eminent Russian poets.