From chokers to conquistadors

There was something delightfully fitting about Andres Iniesta providing the decisive touch to the Spanish quest for the football Holy Grail. As John Dykes of ESPN observed, the sprightly Barcelona midfielder had embodied the ethos of the Spanish campaign at FIFA 2010 more than any other player. The present Spanish team under Vicente Del Bosque had distinguished itself from its earlier “flattering to deceive” World Cup avatars with a grittiness and tenacity that had empowered it to see off challenges from mighty adversaries like Germany and Portugal. And it was Iniesta that singularly exemplified these qualities – often dictating the tempo of the Spanish game and, ultimately, sealing the victory against the Dutch with that knock-out punch of a goal in the dying minutes of the extra time in Soccer City.





Despite the shocking defeat against Switzerland in their opening group game, the Spanish campaign this time around was marked by a resolve to refute the choruses of skeptics who had billed the team’s European Cup win in 2008 as a flash in the pan. The Spaniards were determined to bury the tag of chokers once and for all. And bury they did, and thus broke their World Cup jinx with their final win against the much-fancied Dutch.

    

Spain's monumental achievement has generated a flood of commentary seeking to read a wider political meaning into it. Many an animated pundit has found it hard to resist the temptation to elevate the Spanish triumph from merely a great sporting achievement to an event that portends a path-breaking and durable realignment in the Spanish political and cultural landscape. That a team comprising players from the various nationalities of Spain, a veritable melange of Basque, Catalan, and Castilian flavors, could project a united face on their road to world football domination is touted as a pointer to a collective Iberian yearning to wiggle out of the strong current of fragmented regionalism that has shaped Spain's identity as a nation for long. It has been remarked that the Spanish people are all set to dismantle the divisive legacy of General Franco for good.

However, this excessively sanguine view, smacking almost of a pitiable ignorance of the fractious and highly contested character and history of European nation states and national identities, has not gone completely unchallenged. Writing for the Counterpunch magazine, Harry Browne instills a measure of sobriety into the largely overblown examination of the Spanish World Cup triumph and its implications:

"Not only are sporting victories fleeting, but as much as we love our football it turns out we usually know the difference between the carnival politics of a soccer tournament and the real ones of our divided societies."

The Italian fiasco

You have to feel for Marcello Lippi. In posterity’s assessment, his failure to retain the FIFA World Cup in 2010 for Italy may overshadow his winning it for them in 2006. And, going by the political fallout in Italy of the Azzuri’s unceremonious exit from South Africa 2010, especially the alacrity with which the xenophobic Northern League latched onto it to advance their anti-immigrant rhetoric, Lippi may even be judged to have contributed massively to a neo-fascist risorgimento in southern Europe. That might seem a bit far-fetched. But if you know ‘posterity’ by now, you sure know it will find a way around it. Tony Blair gets it. That is why he is adamantly banking on posterity to ‘exonerate’ him for a misadventure that many among the ‘contemporary’ feel too close to the bone to exonerate him for. Given posterity’s well-documented penchant for the grotesque, Lippi may be praying to Santa Maria that he may be condemned merely as a failed football manager.


Lippi’s hope of successfully defending the title was pretty ambitious and a bit ahistoric to begin with (as P. Govinda Pillai might put it in one of his frequent hyperbolic moments, it was ‘diametrically opposed to the dialectically ordered trajectory of history’). There have been only two instances of nations winning the most sought-after crown in world football in consecutive fashion: Italy itself in 1934 and 1938; and Brazil in 1958 and 1962. And only Italy’s feat was accomplished with the same manager at the helm on both occasions (the matchless Vittorio Pozzo). So, Lippi might have guessed that his expectation of a comeback victory strayed a bit beyond the zone of the probable. In the inimitably street-wise lingo of the stand-up comedian Chris Rock, if you want to be guaranteed of making money on the ‘comeback’, you either have to be a drug dealer or a medical practitioner. And, needless to say, Lippi was neither.  


To be fair to Italy, they were not the first defending champions to bow out in the first round of the FIFA World Cup – the most recent instance being France’s disgraceful stumbling at the first hurdle in Korea-Japan 2002. Having drawn a blank in their first two matches, France had to beat Denmark by a margin of two goals in their final preliminary-round match in Incheon. A victory by two goals was achieved – by the Danes. What was unique about Italy’s departure was that it had seemed eerily inevitable from the start. And, when it finally happened with that shocker of a defeat against Slovakia at Ellis Park in Johannesburg, it hardly generated the sort of shockwaves that would normally accompany a high-profile team’s upset by minnows. 


Part of the reason for this collective nonchalance may have been what was evident all along – the elephant in the room – i.e. the team Italy brought to South Africa was, technically and talent-wise, million miles away from the one that triumphed in Germany four years ago. While the absence of Del Piero and Nesta was glaring, the presence and performance of the likes of Cannavaro and Zambrotta was hardly convincing. And the legendary rock solid Italian defense, the team’s kingpin in the normal run of things, crumbled like a pack of cards when exposed to hardly intimidating attacks from Paraguay and New Zealand. Midfield was often in disarray and Iaquinta’s and Di Natale’s striking abilities lacked the sting and predatory instincts of Totti and ‘Pippo’ Inzaghi. And, Gigi Buffon’s early exit due to injury deprived the team of a world-class goalkeeper. Italian team at South Africa 2010 was simply not championship material, period. 


Nevertheless, it’s not yet time to pen Italian football’s obituary. Italy has bounced back from disastrous tournaments before. In fact, on any given day, they are far superior to the grossly overrated but invariably ill-equipped sides like England. In Cesare Prandelli, Lippi’s replacement as national coach, they have a tactically accomplished and hard working manager. He has spent almost half a decade with the Tuscan outfit Fiorentina, enabling it to regain some of the spark that characterized the club when it had Gabriel Batistuta among its ranks. Italian football is all set to be on a road to recovery, and FIFA 2010 will soon be a distant memory.

Messi makes his mark

By the time Argentina took the field to meet South Korea at Soccer City, Johannesburg on the 17th of June, it was plainly high time some spark was woven into the jaded narrative of FIFA 2010. Instead of the stuff of dreams that had been hoped for, the world had been treated to a display of languid and uninspiring football. The tame affair that had unfolded often resembled a ludicrous comedy of errors. Pundits and commentators had started to dish out thinly disguised doomsday predictions. Airwaves and blogs were abuzz with heated debates as to how intense was the death knell of the beautiful game being rung in the Rainbow Nation. Big stars of the more fancied teams had especially come in for the most stringent type of flak. English tabloids had a field day mocking the “buttery fingers” of their goalkeeper, Robert Green. In fact, goalkeeping blunders and frequent near misses at goal were becoming the leitmotif of FIFA 2010. The much-vaunted Portuguese and the Spaniards appeared woefully short of ideas. Even the Germans’ relatively respectable performance against the Aussies was shorn of the habitual Teutonic, well-oiled efficiency. An extraordinary touch of brilliance was deemed necessary to steer the world event to a respectable level of reckoning. A gush of flair and fluidity, a dash of the spectacular were called for. A player of the caliber of Lionel Messi–the player who had enthralled Catalonia and rest of the world with his sublime skills–had to deliver. And he heeded the call on that sunny afternoon in Soccer City, and the Koreans were left to bear the brunt of a performance par excellence that ripped the fabric of the lethal ennui of the status quo.

All great players have had to deal with crushing burden of expectations throughout the bulk of their careers. While some are weighed down by it (remember the incredible fizzling out of the Columbian ace Faustino Asprilla at USA 94; the striker who played a key role in dismantling the mighty Argentines by 5 goals to nil in Buenos Aires at the South American qualification stage fell well short of replicating his feat at the Finals; he remained an ineffectual onlooker through Columbia’s ignominy, which petered out with that fatal own goal by Andres Escobar), others like Messi use it as a launching pad to excel and raise their game at its highest levels. That Messi was going to be instrumental in Argentina’s World Cup campaign had acquired the status of received wisdom even as the South American giants struggled through an unusually mediocre qualification campaign. When, in late 2009, Argentina was languishing at the bottom of CONMEBOL points table, Franz Beckenbauer articulated the thoughts of millions of football devotees all around the globe when he categorically told the Spanish daily El Mundo that “There cannot be a World Cup without a player like Like Messi”.

The Catalan powerhouse F. C. Barcelona had hitched its fortunes to a playing strategy heavily centered on Messi’s phenomenal abilities on their road to revival after a brief but agonizing spell of playing second fiddle to their loathed Castillian rivals, Real Madrid. He had an exceptional La Liga season in 2006-7. While his goal against Getafe in the Copa del Rey semifinal attracted instant comparison with none other than Maradona’s ‘Goal of the Century’ against England, it was the equally (in)famous ‘Hand of God’ that was invoked by the pundits to refer to the cheeky strike he made against the fellow Catalan outfit Espanyol in a league match. He played a stellar role in Barcelona’s successful 2008-09 UEFA Champions League campaign, topping his efforts with a goal to wrap things up in the Final against Manchester United. His crowning glory came in 2009 when he was awarded the FIFA World Player of the Year.

Only the seriously aesthetically challenged could have been oblivious to the verve and dynamism of Messi’s game against the Koreans. He produced moves of exceptional quality; turned, twisted and rammed his way through the defence. His passes were a delight to behold. And, a la Maradona, he exhibited an uncanny ability to slip away from his markers. He donned the role of playmaker and provider with ardor and panache. His presence and impact were so decisive in the game that it seems almost a travesty of justice that he didn’t make it into the scoring sheet. Gonzalo Higuaín may have emerged the top scorer, but it was Messi’s game all the way. And, hopefully, he may have raised the bar for other great players and provided a template for them to perform to their potential in the forthcoming matches at FIFA 2010. It’s still early days, and it’s conceivable that Messi may find it too demanding a task to sustain his excellence as the tournament progresses. But if he does continue to deliver his best, and guides Argentina to their third World Cup triumph, the Pele-Maradona greatness debate will be relegated to the footnotes of history.

Another "Italia 90" in the making?

If we were to prepare a list of epithets to reflect on the just-concluded preliminary round of matches of the 2010 World Cup, ‘damp squib’ would definitely be somewhere at the very top. Despite all the proclamations about superstars such as Messi, Rooney and Ronaldo ripping their rival teams into shreds, it’s their mighty reputations that lie largely in tatters. The skills, brilliance, and mastery of the game held in high esteem by the legions of their fans have been conspicuous–by their absence. The celebrated footballing abilities that enthralled Europe’s club circuit in the past season have apparently not crossed over to the ongoing edition of the game’s biggest spectacle. And, instead of the thrilling, free-flowing football the fans were hoping to savor, what has been on offer is an insipid brew of ineptitude and lackluster. And if the quality of the matches so far is a pointer to the way the event is evolving, what we can anticipate is a letdown of gigantic proportions.

The agony is compounded by the overwhelming sense that this is not how it was supposed to turn out. For some years, the whole soccer universe had held it as an article of faith that an event of the stature of the World Cup, the game’s hallowed ground, would never revisit anything akin to the horror that was Italia 90. Fans of the game still recoil at the thought of that nightmare of a tournament, in which certain venerated notions about the beautiful game came a cropper in the face of an unprecedented display of a negative and defensive approach to the game. A spell of serious soul-searching and an endeavor to revamp the tarnished character and philosophy of the game followed the debacle, and a consensus centered on the idea of a conscious and relentless rejection of attempts to ‘dumb down’ the game tactically and technically gradually emerged. Although never an unalloyed success, a deep-rooted conviction never to revert to the brief but horrendous fling with the foregrounding of the defensive game has been embedded in the outlook of the football fraternity at all levels post Italia 90. Even the rampant commercialization that reshaped the game in manifold ways since the early 1990s failed to a large extent to dismantle the project, and the football universe was thrilled to witness the game gaining back its stellar elegance and excellence with the roaring success of subsequent tournaments such as France 98 and Euro 2008.

However, the first few days of FIFA 2010 have generated an eerie sense of dismay and dread among the fans, as the quality of the tournament so far has been patchy at best. A sense that this is another Italia 90 in the making is slowly but steadily gathering momentum. Let’s hope that the ensuing round of matches will prove us wrong. Its time to keep our fingers crossed. Let’s keep believing that the spirit of Joga Bonito will ultimately prevail, and that the ghosts of Italia 90 will not be resurrected.

The best form of offence – a review of John Foot’s "Calcio: A History of Italian Football"

Most football enthusiasts prefer their game the pulse-racing, riveting way. The dazzling centre-forward racking up goals aplenty, agile wingers bursting forth from both flanks in gay abandon, piercing runs that paralyze the defence and culminate in the dejected goalkeeper collecting the ball from the back of the net – these are the stock images that populate the legends and lores of the “beautiful game”. In the eyes of the demanding fan, any approach to the game that does not guarantee ceaseless adrenaline rush is an object of derision and disdain. The exalted status that the Latin American teams enjoy is mainly due to the pace and radiance attributed to their game. However, Italy, one of the most successful of the footballing nations, is perceived to have thrived by embracing an intransigent defensive method, which diverges markedly from the devotees’ lofty expectations. Indeed, votaries of the game view the persistent defensive streak in the Italian game as boring at best and as a cynical ploy to win at any cost at worst. As conventional football wisdom would have it, the Italian teams may be adept at holding on to an early advantage, their domestic league (Serie A) may attract talent from all over the world, but the way they play their game makes totally reasonable men crave for the relative charms of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. And this persistent defensive mentality is not just a blight that afflicts the national team; it seems to seep into the club level as well, generating comparisons that pit the Serie A unfavourably against other European domestic club competitions like the English Premier League and the Spanish La Liga. This much-derided technical orientation of the Italian game is one among the many themes that John Foot explores, in an engrossing work that chronicles the history and development of the Italian football from its early stirrings in the late nineteenth century to the World Cup glory of 2006.

In order to complement the intense personal strain that permeates the work, Foot largely eschews the well-worn chronological narrative style, in favour of chapters organized around various themes. Foot’s love affair with Italian football began on a bitter note, as he was enraged by the Juventus’ 1980 acquisition of his Arsenal hero, Liam Brady. It was cold comfort to him that Brady faithfully lived up to the time-honoured tradition of English players faring miserably in the Italian league. The sense of distaste that emerged in the wake of Turin club’s audacity in depriving his club of the services of his favourite player lingered till he moved to Milan in the late 1980s, ostensibly for an academic purpose – to study the origins of Fascism in Milan. Thereafter, he began to be captivated by the profound, all-consuming fervour that the game of football evoked in the Italian psyche. The shift in his attitude towards the Italian game coincided with the meteoric rise of the city’s premier club, A. C. Milan. Aided in no small measure by the brilliance of  the Dutch trio – Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, and Frank Rijkard – and a spirited attacking style (a much-vaunted break from the usual defensive Italian method) ushered in by the redoubtable coach, Arrigo Sacchi (who went on to manage the Italian national team in their tumultuous campaign at USA 94), Milan reached the pinnacle of footballing success, winning seven Serie A titles and notching up five European championships.

Foot’s personal reflections on the Italian fascination with football that he encountered in Milan set the tone for his journey into the turbulent yet fascinating world of Italian football that ensues. Tracing the origins of the game in Italy back to the “kickabouts” and impromptu games organized by British sailors in the port towns of Livorno, Genoa, Palermo and Naples (Italy was a stopover on their way to India) in the late Nineteenth Century, Foot touches on how even these origins are contested and politicized in the fractious Italian football parlance. The instant and tremendous popularity the game attained in Italy lent itself to appropriation for political means by the emergent nationalist and Fascist parties in the early Twentieth Century. This was reflected in the decision in 1909 by the nationalist Italian football authorities to give the game an Italian name – Calcio, based on the highly dubious premise of identifying Calcio Fierentino, a game in vogue in Florence during the Renaissance, as the precursor of modern football. However, regardless of the high level of legitimacy that the nationalist attempts to claim the game for their own attained in Italy (even some experts were gullible enough to succumb to this version of events. For instance, the legendary Italian football journalist, Gianni Brera, gave credence to the nationalist position by opining that the English had merely “reinvented” the game), the early history of football in Italy retains a distinctly English flavour. The first football club in Italy, Football Club Torinese, was formed in1898 by Edoardo Bosio, an employee of a British textile company, who had picked up the rudiments of the game in England. And it was an English maritime doctor, James Richardson spensley, who organized the first competitive football match in Italy, between Football Club Torinese and a Genoan club formed by British consular officials.

Having set the record straight on the British contribution to the development of the game in Italy, Foot sets out to fashion a panoramic account of the various partakers and characteristics that make up the spectacle that is Italian football: the love-hate relationship between referees and fans; the enduring nexus between football and politics – a grassroots version of which plays itself out in the vehement confrontations that accompany matches involving teams whose core fan bases champion antithetical and diametrically opposite political creeds, such as the perennial tussle between the predominantly right-wing Lazio ultras and the Livorno zealots who proudly brandish their Tuscan leftist lineage with blaring recitals of anti-Fascist anthems like Bella Ciao and Avanti Popolo (the city of Livorno lies at the heart of the "Red Quadrilateral", a stronghold of the erstwhile Italian Communist Party); great derbies that set the sparks of frenzy alight – Derby della Madonnina between the two towering Milan outfits (delightfully named after the statue of Virgin Mary atop the Milan Cathedral), Derby della Capitale between Roma and Lazio, Derby d’Italia between Internazionale and Juventus, etc.; the passion and violence that underlie the fan rivalries. He also provides a revealing glimpse into the extraordinary level of pressure that plague the players and managers week in and week out, the adulation they inspire matched only by the brickbats they receive when falling short of fans’ expectations. But, despite the crushing burden of expectations, numerous mercurial stars have always graced the world of Italian football with their enthralling and consistent performances. The names and exploits are too long to be described in detail, but some do deserve a cursory glance at the least: Gianni Rivera, the Golden Boy who marshalled A.C. Milan and the Italian national team in the 60s and the early part of the 70s; The Mazzola dynasy, who blazed new trails in midfield generalship; Gigi Riva, Paolo Rossi, Roberto Baggio, Del Piero; and foreigners like Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidan, and Andriy Shevchenko.

Foot also vigorously challenges one of the most potent charges the detractors of Italian football often wave against it: its obsession with the defensive mode. Foot berates it for the blatant misrepresentation it is and mounts a strong defence against this frivolous viewpoint: “Italian teams have not been defensive. They have, quite simply, been much better at defending than other European teams. Italian defenders can all trap the ball, dribble and pass. [They] are also, usually, faster and more tactically aware than defenders in other countries”. One would be hard pressed to argue that Foot does not have a strong case here - at least to the extent that Italian defenders are generally more competent and capable than their counterparts, and that there is more to defensive football than a cynical desire to take the steam out of the game and subject the spectators to endless agony. Anyone who has watched Claudio Gentile, the “Butcher of Turin”, effectively neutralize many a steamrolling striker (the way he dealt with Maradona in the World Cup of 1982 was a formidable display of man-marking and hard tackling. He added insult to injury by famously quipping after the game, “Football is not for ballerinas”), or witnessed Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini straddling the field is bound to agree with Foot’s contention. Nevertheless, Foot’s impassioned arguments in favour of the brilliance of the Italian defensive style only partially address the criticism levelled against the Italian game. He does not quite succeed in arguing away the crux of the critics’ reason behind labelling the Italian game as often lifeless and uninspiring – the paucity of goals that routinely characterize it. A more sophisticated and seasoned estimation of the game may not treat supply of goals in abundance as the absolute benchmark, but the lowest common denominator that provides the game with its raison d'être may contest that perspective. And one glaring statistic appears to bear out the critics’ position: the all-time top scorer for Italy in international games is Gigi Riva, and his tally of 35 goals from 42 games compares disastrously against that of the leading scorers of other major, and even some minor, footballing nations. To cite just two examples: Gerd Mueller of West Germany has scored 68 goals in 62 games; Ferenc Puskas has netted 84 goals for Hungary from 85 appearances.

The starry-eyed way in which John Foot predominantly views Italian football does not lead him to gloss over its darker side. In fact, the book is also peppered with accounts of numerous scandals and misdemeanours, some of which have had devastating impact on the integrity of the game itself. Foot often laments how the very popularity and high stakes the game is associated with in Italy have often led it down the murky and dingy lanes of match-fixing and corruption. He draws special attention to the Moggipoli scandal that came to light immediately before the 2006 World Cup that Italy, incidentally, went on to win. The infamous affair, in which Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi and others were implicated for conspiring with referees in order to win favourable decision for their teams, took much of the shine off Italy’s thoroughly deserved World Cup victory and led to Juventus being relegated from the top flight of Italian football for the 2006-07 season. According to Foot, what was most depressing about the scandal was that it was so typical of the scandal-ridden world of Italian football. In fact, Moggippoli was only the latest in a string of infamies that has come to symbolize the corroded Italian football apparatus. Scintillating and beautiful the game itself may remain, the passion of the fans is still undiminished, but those who have been assigned the responsibility of running the game have often let it down with their greed and hubris. Though almost overpowered by disenchantment and dismay at the state of affairs, Foot winds down with a decision to keep his faith in Italian football. He is too much in awe of the finer aspects of the Italian game to entirely give up on it. He is convinced that the “beautiful game” will ultimately triumph:

“Despite everything, millions of fans kept their faith. Calcio was in deep trouble, but it still had the ability to anger and move people, to make them laugh, to unite and divide, to inspire like no other game”.

 

On by-elections and talking heads

The announcement of the results of by-elections held in three assembly constituencies in Kerala – Alappuzha, Ernakulam and Kannur – was predictably followed by the airwaves being filled with endless repartee between the talking heads of Kerala’s two predominant political outfits. Political chutzpah and punditry were on full display on all networks. TV audience was treated to the sight of commentators after commentators analyzing and scrutinising the verdict to the point of exhaustion. That, even after a harrowing campaign in which allegations of foul play flew thick and fast and barrages of accusations verging on paranoia abounded, politicians could still muster sufficient vigor to offer highly charged analytical acumen, confounded the polity to no end. People of Kerala can rest assured that, at least when it comes talking the talk, their politicians are a reliable breed. Never mind that most of the rhetoric amounted to nothing more than exercises in verbal one-upmanship and would not stand up to scrutiny or common sense.

The UDF stalwarts interpreted the setback suffered by the LDF as yet another illustration of the organization’s withering electoral fortunes, a trend set in motion with the drubbing it received at the parliamentary polls earlier this year. However, the LDF partisans made sure that reduced majorities of the victors were not lost sight of, and they laid emphatic stress on it as a testament to the Left’s resurgence. While M.M. Hassan, his grated voice increasingly resembling that of a hippo with a bad throat ache, donned the role of the chief UDF spokesperson, LDF fielded an array of experts to make the art of scurrying for cover look respectable. Barbs and insults were traded with élan, and both parties ensured that mimicry artists would not run out of material at least until the next election cycle. Hassan Sahib kept reminding those who voted for the Congress how they had contributed to an epoch-making event and graciously offered his LDF colleagues a crash course in how to avoid shrinking into complete irrelevance in Kerala’s political landscape. M. V. Govindan Master and Prakashan Master of CPI (M) started their rebuttals sensibly enough, but inevitably resorted to what they do best even at the best of times, i.e., sounding shrill and self-righteous.

Veliyam Bharghavan once again demonstrated that his descent into senility has reached a point of no-return, as he mumbled his way through press conferences and interviews (but did not come close enough to topping that gem he uttered at the height CPI-CPM feud regarding the Ponnani Lok Sabha seat – the one about CPI winning most of the seats in the elections that followed the split of 1964, an observation that V.S. Achuthanandan took strong exception to). Rajmohan Unnithan reveled in his characteristic grandstanding and once again offered clues as to why Malayalees were largely spared the impact of Navajot Singh Sidhu’s protracted absence from the national scene. He also earned the immense gratitude of Malayalees for volunteering to fulfill every society’s need to periodically exorcise its lingering, atavistic elements of nuttiness. Bhasurendra Babu threw in everything from economic determinism to neo-Marxism but still managed to sound totally incomprehensible, and stood as a shining embodiment of everything the Left should be keeping at bay if it holds any desire to connect with the rising generation of voters.

Also awaited with bated breaths was K.E.N Kunhahammad offering some kind of insight along the lines of how the vulgarity displayed by the electorate in snubbing the LDF provided a rich cultural milieu for the Party to tap into and capitalize on in the future (or some other absurdity of similar kind). Alas, that never came. Well, one should be thankful for small mercies

Vladimir Mayakovsky: The 'raging bull' and the 'whipped dog'

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s literary genius was not always confined to Agitprop poster propaganda and homages to the ideals of the Revolution. It occasionally trod tortuous and tormented personal trails as well, when he let slip the revolutionary fervor and offered a glimpse into the vexed abyss of his self – manifested morbidly yet movingly in this unfinished poem penned on the day he took his own life:

Past one o’clock. You're probably in bed.
The Milky Way is like Oka of silver
No need for me to rush. I have no reasons left
to stir you with the lightnings of my cable ferver.
And so they say, the incident dissolved.
The Love Boat smashed up on the dreary routine.
We’re even. There’s no use in keeping the score
of mutual hurts, affliction and spleen.
Look here, the world exudes an eerie calm.
The sky bequeathed to us its constellations.
In periods like this I’d like to be the one
with ages, history and the creation.

Unlike most writers who have sworn allegiance to a political ideology or movement, Mayakovsky’s artistic vision, in its heyday, seldom betrayed any perceptible tussle between irreconcilable impulses. The image of conflicting loyalties engaged in ceaseless battle to gain ascendancy was never a hallmark of his poetic vision. The intriguing picture of the artistic conscience torn apart by the act of subordinating his art to political objectives did not fit Mayakovsky. Ardent revolutionary was in harmony with the thwarted lover, at times overlapping but mostly inhabiting separate spheres. Raw exhortations to the proletariat coexisted effortlessly with the avant-garde finesse of futurism. Official recognition and public adulation followed, and the infinite variety and experimental verve were feted by the establishment as long as the Trotskyite axiom of Party not commanding the “domain of art” held sway. But the onset of high Stalinism, with its intolerance towards any real or perceived deviation from the dogma of socialist realism, rang the death knell for Soviet avant-garde art.

The shift in the milieu and its dreadful aftermath did not set Mayakovosky on any course of realignment vis-à-vis how his poetry would relate to the Revolution. There is scant evidence of any expressed desire to renege on his political ideals either. His poetic destiny, or at the very least its political manifestation, would continue to be linked inextricably to the sentiment he had expressed long ago, as a budding poet striving to reaffirm his commitment in the frenzy of the Revolution:

“To accept or not to accept? There was no question for me….My Revolution"
(I Myself)

However, the Stalinist assault on the ‘decadent’ formalist tendencies in Mayakovsky’s work did make a dent in his exalted status as the leading exponent of the Soviet art. The sense of disillusionment that beset him in his later life left its scars on him. The constant scrutiny and hounding by Stalinist apparatchiks took its toll on his creativity, and may have contributed to his decision to end his own life. In a gripping article in The Haaretz newspaper, Dalia karpel strikes at the heart of the troubled poet’s unresolved, and ultimately fatal, predicament: “Mayakovsky, the ‘raging bull of Russian poetry …..is also the ‘whipped dog’, in pain and tormented…”