A Cloud in Trousers
The 2nd edition, 1918
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| Author | Vladimir Mayakovsky |
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| Original title | Облако в штанах |
| Country | Russian Empire |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | Poem |
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Publication date
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1915 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
A Cloud in Trousers (Облако в штанах, Oblako v shtanakh) is a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky written in 1914 and first published in 1915 by Osip Brik.
Originally titled The 13th Apostle (but renamed at the advice of a censor) Mayakovsky's first major poem was written from the vantage point of a spurned lover, depicting the heated subjects of love, revolution, religion and art, taking the poet's stylistic choices to a new extreme, linking irregular lines of declamatory language with surprising rhymes. It is considered to be a turning point in his work and one of the cornerstones of the Russian Futurist poetry.
The subject of Mayakovsky's unrequited love was whom he met in Odessa during the Futurists' 1913 tour. Born in 1894 in Kharkov to a poor peasant family, Maria at the time resided with the family of her sister (whose husband Filippov was an affluent man) and was an art school student, learning sculpture. Vasily Kamensky described Denisova as "a girl of a rare combination of qualities: good looks, sharp intellect, strong affection for all things new, modern and revolutionary."
Maria's sister Yekaterina Denisova, who ran a domestic literary salon, invited the three now famous young Futurist poets, Mayakovsky, Burlyuk and Kamensky, to their house. Prior to this Maria and Vladimir met three weeks earlier at the Mir Iskusstva exhibition, but that was a fleeting acquaintance. Mayakovsky fell in love instantly and gave her the nickname, Gioconda.
The intensity of Mayakovsky's passion was unbearable. According to Kamensky, he suffered immensely and was hectically rushing things, caring not for what he thought to be the girl's indecisiveness and fussiness. It looked as if he completely misunderstood the situation: Maria (unlike her sister) was just not impressed either by the Futurists, or by Mayakovsky. Indecisive she was anything but; "on the contrary, her later life proved to be the chain of extraordinary events, triggered by most daring, reckless decisions," according to biographer Mikhaylov.
In the mid-1910s Maria Denisova lived in Switzerland with her first husband, then, as the latter moved to England, returned to the Soviet Russia. She fought in the Russian Civil War and married the Red Army general whom she divorced in the late 1920s. Denisova became an established Soviet monumentalist sculptor, one of her better known works being "The Poet" (1927), Mayakovsky's head set in plaster. In the late 1930s she fell into obscurity and stopped seeing friends, one of her two daughters, Alice, having fled to England. Denisova committed suicide in 1944 by jumping from the tenth floor.
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