conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for a story with the title 'Vladimir Mayakovsky'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Vladimir Mayakovsky
  Mayakovsky's empathy with the urban poor was born of experience. The son of a forest ranger, born in 1893 in Georgia, he was forced to move with his family to Moscow after his father's sudden death. The world of rented rooms and poverty, intensified subsequently in That's What by communist Moscow's painful attempts to catch up with modernity, is matched by the creativity of a brilliant artistic imagination engaging in its own way with the verbal and visual experiments of Futurism, Constructivism, Formalism and the host of other feverishly creative "isms" that have made Russian Modernism so powerfully influential in world art. In the winter of 1913-1914 the Futurists, with whom Mayakovsky identified, had toured Russia, reading their work to large and sometimes hostile audiences. Mayakovsky, with his huge build, huger voice and flamboyant clothes, was himself a "slap in the face of public taste", (the title of a Futurist manifesto) and revelled in the role, which he went on to combine with his own unique formulation of the unfallen spirit of the revolution.
  His extremely personal style was developing rapidly. He hated "fine writing", prettiness and sentimentality, and went to the opposite extreme, employing the rough talk of the streets, deliberate grammatical heresies and all kinds of neologisms, which he turned (in HVM) into a compendium of revolutionary rhetoric aimed at aesthetic victory in the class war. He wrote much blank verse, but also made brilliant (almost untranslatable) use of a rich variety of rhyme schemes, assonance and alliteration, creating complex patterns. In his public readings, he would often declaim in a staccato "that's what" take-it-or-leave-it style, indicated typographically by the use of very short lines, spilling down the page in a distinctive "staircase" shape which also turns into a narrative principle, analysed by Victor Shklovsky: b
  His most popular poem among present-day Russian readers, however, is undoubtedly the pre-revolutionary Oblako v Shtanakh (The Cloud in Trousers, 1915). Its dramatic gestures of despair at being rejected by Maria, his lover, (actually a composite figure), prefigure the more complex and extended masochistic narratives of humiliation and defeat in That's What. In both poems the poet's suffering grows to become a paradigm of all the rejection and dispossession in the world, and his rage swells to encompass art, religion and the entire social order, until he is threatening to bring the whole world crashing down in revenge for his failure in love, and the social conspiracy which has cheated him of the object of his overwhelming (Oedipal?) desire. The intensity of these emotions carried him close to madness, and found its "objective correlative" in the creative and destructive energies of the revolution. George Hyde discusses in his Preface the intermittently happy, ultimately destructive ménage à trois he conducted with Osip and Lily Brik, recorded in painful detail in a recent play by Steve Trafford, A Cloud in Trouserse and echoed in many sequences of That's What. She did not reject him, but neither did she reciprocate his immoderate love, or give up other admirers. For sixteen years Mayakovsky publicly lamented Lily's coldness and inconstancy, beginning just a few months after their first meeting with The Backbone Flute (1915). But what he really wanted from her, at the end of the day, it would be hard to say.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Russian, Hopkins's, sprung, departing, based, stressed, influenced.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Vladimir Mayakovsky
  Mayakovsky's empathy with the urban poor was born of experience. The son of a forest ranger, born in 1893 in Georgia, he was forced to move with his family to Moscow after his father's sudden death. The world of rented rooms and poverty, intensified subsequently in That's What by communist Moscow's painful attempts to catch up with modernity, is matched by the creativity of a brilliant artistic imagination engaging in its own way with the verbal and visual experiments of Futurism, Constructivism, Formalism and the host of other feverishly creative "isms" that have made Russian Modernism so powerfully influential in world art. In the winter of 1913-1914 the Futurists, with whom Mayakovsky identified, had toured Russia, reading their work to large and sometimes hostile audiences. Mayakovsky, with his huge build, huger voice and flamboyant clothes, was himself a "slap in the face of public taste", (the title of a Futurist manifesto) and revelled in the role, which he went on to combine with his own unique formulation of the unfallen spirit of the revolution. 
  His extremely personal style was developing rapidly. He hated "fine writing", prettiness and sentimentality, and went to the opposite extreme, employing the rough talk of the streets, deliberate grammatical heresies and all kinds of neologisms, which he turned (in HVM) into a compendium of revolutionary rhetoric aimed at aesthetic victory in the class war. He wrote much blank verse, but also made brilliant (almost untranslatable) use of a rich variety of rhyme schemes, assonance and alliteration, creating complex patterns. His rhythms are powerful but irregular, departing from the syllabo-tonic principle of Russian versification, and based on the number of stressed syllables in a line, rather like Hopkins's dynamic-archaic "sprung rhythm", and influenced by Whitman and Verhaeren. In his public readings, he would often declaim in a staccato "that's what" take-it-or-leave-it style, indicated typographically by the use of very short lines, spilling down the page in a distinctive "staircase" shape which also turns into a narrative principle, analysed by Victor Shklovsky: b
  His most popular poem among present-day Russian readers, however, is undoubtedly the pre-revolutionary Oblako v Shtanakh (The Cloud in Trousers, 1915). Its dramatic gestures of despair at being rejected by Maria, his lover, (actually a composite figure), prefigure the more complex and extended masochistic narratives of humiliation and defeat in That's What. In both poems the poet's suffering grows to become a paradigm of all the rejection and dispossession in the world, and his rage swells to encompass art, religion and the entire social order, until he is threatening to bring the whole world crashing down in revenge for his failure in love, and the social conspiracy which has cheated him of the object of his overwhelming (Oedipal?) desire. The intensity of these emotions carried him close to madness, and found its "objective correlative" in the creative and destructive energies of the revolution. George Hyde discusses in his Preface the intermittently happy, ultimately destructive ménage à trois he conducted with Osip and Lily Brik, recorded in painful detail in a recent play by Steve Trafford, A Cloud in Trouserse and echoed in many sequences of That's What. She did not reject him, but neither did she reciprocate his immoderate love, or give up other admirers. For sixteen years Mayakovsky publicly lamented Lily's coldness and inconstancy, beginning just a few months after their first meeting with The Backbone Flute (1915). But what he really wanted from her, at the end of the day, it would be hard to say.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me another paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Pro Eto ends with a strange kind of apotheosis. The suicidal "man on the bridge", who is one version of Mayakovsky, might just be resurrected, he thinks, as someone who could live placidly in the "real" world. His best bet, he thinks, might be to be reincarnated as a zoo-keeper, because he knows Lily loves animals as much as he does; one day while visiting the zoo she might just stray into his terrain. Appropriately enough, Soviet medical science had already begun to address the problem of eternal life / resurrection, promising something of the sort through blood transfusions which were supposed to function like some kind of early cryogenics and keep people going more or less for ever.u The Formalists spoke of the "resurrection of the word" v and Jakobson and Shklovsky saw in Futurism not just a new aesthetic principle but a transformation of consciousness equivalent to an apocalyptic vision of a new world. With Mayakovsky, too, Christian imagery is never far away, fuelling his creative use of blasphemy, often applied to the Revolution. The poet is both Christ and Antichrist. The cross Mayakovsky bears links him with Pasternak and even with Pasternak's Soviet anti-hero, Dr. Zhivago, who also carried throughout his life the cross of his conviction that love was "the heart of everything", and interpreted the Revolution as a daemonic kind of "deliverance". It was specifically love's boat that was wrecked, in Mayakovsky's farewell poem, against the rocks of "byt".
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Her published work includes poetry (The Stone Garden, Moscow, 2001) and numerous translations of poetry, fiction, history and memoires. Her translation of Love Story (Moscow, 1990) went through three editions. At the time of publication, she is involved in a new publishing project, Dolinskaya Storona, which deals with the history of Vyatka (formerly Kirov), the Russian region close to the Urals. She is specialising in research on several dynasties of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century merchant families there.
  Since 1979 she has been a member of the Moscow Writers' Committee, and she has been vice-chairperson of its poetry section since 1994. In February 1991, and again in April 1994, she visited the British Centre for Literary Translation (Norwich) as a recipient of bursaries.
  Larisa Gureyeva's other interests include modern art (especially the Pre-Raphaelites, Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, and the Symbolists) and music. She is married to Sergei Korolev, a prominent heart surgeon.