NONFICTION AND FICTION IN V. MAYAKOVSKY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY "I, MYSELF"
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s autobiography “I, Myself” is a dual aesthetic phenomenon. Due to the synthesis of the documentary and the poetic elements, a special genre variety emerges, namely a ‘poetical autobiography’. Being a category of form and content, the ‘poetical autobiography’ does not only consider the person’s life as the life of a Poet, but it also solves this task employing a diverse range of poetic means. The main function of Mayakovsky’s autobiography is that of modeling. A retrospective transformation of the facts about his life creates the poet’s individual myth. Mayakovsky’s autobiography fits the context of multiple futuristic self-presentations. The history of its creation and the poetics of the title are taken into consideration. The autobiography’s pathos is completely defined by the time when it appeared, by the futurists’ fight for an active position in the new social reality. Mayakovsky intentionally highlights the formal traits of the genre, which traditionally comprise the ‘autobiographical pact’:focusing on dependable information, precisely defining the principles of selecting the material, referring to memory, giving meta-text notes. The poet departs from the genre canon, though: he devises a new identity type based on consciously overriding individualism; the theory of LEF (the Left Front of the Arts) does not allow him to go deep into the individual psychology, which the author replaces by an ironic play with the psychoanalysis technique, by a dry listing of actions and achievements. The autobiography contains a significant number of poetic text features. A new subject of speech and of creative consciousness corresponds to the new aesthetics. The autobiography “I, Myself” is considered in the context of Mayakovsky’s works of the 1920s which are linked with it by a unity of thoughts about the logic of the human fate and by the affinity of artistic techniques.