Lydia Seifullina Remembers Mayakovsky

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At the time of the October Revolution, in Moscow, short of bread and fuel, a group of young educational workers, including Lydia Seifullina, walked all the way from Usachovka to the Polytechnical Museum to attend a discussion between futurists and imagists. it was at that discussion that Seifullina furst say Mayakovsky. Recalling the occasion decades later, Seifullina wrote:

He [Mayakovsky] entered the hall suddenly and noiselessly, appearing not on the stage but in the aisle at the back. Such was the quality of Mayakovsky, however, that his presence could never remain unnoticed. . . . There was a movement in the hall. People sitting in the front rows turned their heads. I, too, looked around and I saw a face that is impossible to forget.

One can find numerous adjectives to describe Vladimir Mayakovsky's face--strong-willed, handsome, manly, intelligent, inspired. And all of them will be apt, not the least bit exaggerated. Yet they do not convey the main thing--the quality that made the poet's face unforgettable. Mayakovsky's face was alive with a flame that came from within and that is so rarely met with in outward manifestation, the indisputable flame of his talent, of his soul.

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