After all, I still can't write a better White one. He's talking about his fun - "he threw a pineapple into the sky", and I'm talking about my whining - "hundreds of painful days".

V. Mayakovsky. "I myself"

Probably, everyone who passed through the Soviet school will always remember the following lines from Mayakovsky's poem "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin":.

Unit!

Who needs it?!

Voice units

thinner than a squeak.

Who will hear it? -

Unless the wife!

And then

if not at the bazaar,

and close. (...)

Party -

million-fingered hand,

compressed version

to one

smashing fist.

Unit-nonsense,

one-zero (...)

Party -

this

my shoulders...

These lines of Mayakovsky's clearly echo a fragment of Andrey Bely's novel Petersburg, in which the "human" part of the story is written in Russian.

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an insignificant unit is also contrasted with a unit with many zeros: "In unity (...) there is no horror; the unit itself is nothing;

exactly-one!.. But one plus thirty zeros is formed in the ugliness of a pentallion (...)

Yes,-

as a human unit, that is, this skinny stick, Nikolai Apollonovich lived in space until now, making a run from eternal times -

"Nikolai Apollonovich was a stick in Adam's costume; he was ashamed of his thinness and never went to the bathhouse with anyone -

- in eternal times! "(Bely A. Petersburg, Moscow, 1981, p. 327). On Mayakovsky and Bely, see first of all: Trenin V. V., Khardzhiev N. I. Poeticheskaya kul'tura Mayakovsky [Poetic Culture of Mayakovsky], Moscow, 1970, pp. 55-59; Gasparov M. L. Ritm i sintaktis: proiskhozhdenie "lesenka" Mayakovsky [Rhythm and Syntax: the origin of the "ladder" of Mayakovsky]. Problemy strukturnoy lingvistiki, Moscow, 1979, pp. 160-162; Ivanov V. V. Sun. On the impact of the" aesthetic experiment " by Andrey Bely (V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, M. Tsvetaeva, B. Pasternak) / / Andrey Bely: Problems of Creativity, Moscow, 1988, pp. 345-358; Janecek G. Belyi and Maiakovski / / Russian Literature and American Critics. Ann Arbor, 1984. P. 129-137; Lavrov A.V. Andrey Bely in the 1900s. Zhizn i literaturnaya deyatel'nost ' [Life and Literary Activity], Moscow, 1995, pp. 153, 154, 216.

What are we dealing with here - coincidence or conscious polemical reminiscence (in Bely's case, the "ugliness of a pentallion" that is hostile to the human unit, in Mayakovsky's case, the "shoulders of a million" that are friendly to the human unit)?

It would hardly be wise to give a definitive answer. We will only note that if we are talking about a coincidence in this case, then it is a significant coincidence. After all, the futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky learned to work on a huge scale, not least from the symbolist Andrey Bely (who, in turn, later appreciated the hyperbolic rhetoric of the younger poet).

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