Poetry Month: Mayakovsky’s About This (1923)

Pro eto. Ei i mne (About This. To Her and to Me)
Poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Book design and photomontages by Aleksandr Rodchenko
Photographs of Lili (Lilia; Lilya) Brik by Abram Shterenberg
Moscow-Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo
(State Publishing House), 1923
Letterpress (43 numbered pages), 9 1/8 x 6” (23.1 x 15.4 cm)
Edition: 3,000

Within his long-form poem regarding Lily Brik, Mayakovsky splices reflections on communism, poetic form, and history. Oscillations between the personal and the political, the microcosm and the macrocosm, are not presented as smooth transitions, but as “jump-cuts,” rapid-fire pivots in voice and perspective that appear without warning within the visually homogeneous text. Perhaps most unexpected are Mayakovsky’s sudden moments of self-reflection and his foregrounding the literary device:

I’m just a poem
            I’m just a state of mind.

[…]

Resurrect someone?

                         In the twentieth century?

—Mayakovsky for example?

            We could find someone better—

Just some pretty poet

                                     won’t do.

Written between December 1922 and early February 1923, Pro eto utilizes rapid changes of scene (from Paris, to Berlin, to Moscow), voice (from first to third person), and scale (from the solitary poet to the vast twentieth century), in a manner consistent with Rodchenko’s eight interspersed photomontages. Executed between March and April 1923, Rodchenko’s images illustrate specific lines in the poem, which determine their location in the book. Each photomontage is reproduced below in order of appearance and accompanied by the lines it illustrates as translated by Larisa Gureyeva and George Hyde in Pro Eto = That’s What (Todmorden, UK: Arc Publications, 2009).

For more on the poet, see our online exhibition: Vladimir Mayakovsky: Across Media.

She lies
            In bed.
While he…
On the table is a telephone.

from the cable
            crawled—
scratching jealousy—
            a monster from troglodytic times.

I paw at my ears
                        kneading uselessly.
I hear
            my own
                       my very own voice.
The knife of this voice bores through my paws.

So it ever was
            And ever shall be
                         World without end.

And again
            the walls baked hot like the steppe
echo and sigh in my ears, in the to-step.

I catch my balance
                          wavering frantically.

Four times I try—four times
                                     a child again

She too
             —she used to like animals—
                           will come to the Public Gardens

April 8, 2026