Vladimir Mayakovsky as Exemplary Character: Two Interpretations by Dario Fo and Carmelo Bene

Abstract

This article contributes to the mapping of the role played by the Russian poet, playwright, artist and performer Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) in the Italian context of the 60s and 70s, concentrating on Dario Fo’s L’operaio conosce 300 parole, il padrone 1000, per questo lui è il padrone (1969), and Carmelo Bene’s TV production of Bene! Quattro modi di morire in versi (1974, broadcast in 1978). Mayakovsky appears here as a character, constructed as an exemplary figure for the role of the artist. After framing exemplarity theoretically as a strategy that effaces the intrinsic discrepancy between example and rule, the article will map the presence of this rhetorical move in the two texts. It will discuss the ways in which they share a series of common features, forming in both cases an implicit agenda of legitimization at a time when both Fo and Bene were shifting the context of their practice. In this sense, this contribution argues that Fo’s L’operaio and Bene’s Quattro modi both introduce a programmatic element that defines a specific poetic and politics, and at the same time attempt at performing the very poetic that is being presented.

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