Mayakovsky on the Land

ABSTRACT It is surprising that Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet whose self-proclaimed mission was to give city streets a language, turned to publicizing farming collectives. No less noteworthy is the fact that this poet of internationalism worked on the ethnocentric project of promoting Jewish agrarian communities in Crimea. This article 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 (us-versus-them) dichotomy. Using the Moses story of exile and liberation, the poet both domesticates Jews through features of the dominant culture and marginalizes antisemites by ascribing to them the pejorative markers of the Jewish stereotype.