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The Bedbug Analysis

Decent Essays

Vladimir Mayakovsky's “The Bedbug,” written in 1928-1929, appears to satirize the New Economic Policy. Mayakovsky separates his play into two acts to demonstrate two contrasting ideas, and the idea to stop the progressing bureaucracy from being a participant in the fight for communist power. In “The Bedbug,” Zoya Beryozkina is a working class woman who is rejected by Prisypkin; he abandons the working class world to marry a bourgeoisie woman in the effort to advance himself in society. After attempting suicide, Zoya seems to be quite fine fifty years later when they unfreeze Prisypkin from the past. The first half of the play ends with a tragic fire killing everyone in its presence, with one man unaccounted for. Ironically the only people to survive and advance are Zoya, the working class woman who attempts suicide in scene two, and the people who are associated with the working class. These two acts reflect the removal of the apparatchiks who took advantage of the resources supplied to them by the working class. This is demonstrated in scene one when …show more content…

Rosalie suggests that this investment—beer—would be a better investment, but it is actually the toxic mixture they feed the resurrected to make their “transitional existence easier” (285) and the reason for their own devastation at the wedding. This also demonstrates the threat that the bourgeoisie posed after the establishment of the New Economic Policy. Even unfreezing Prisypkin, along with a bedbug, fifty years later exemplifies how people like him pose a threat to the future of society. Therefore, the people decide to display him and the bedbug like zoo animals titling them “Bedbugus normalis” and “Bourgeoisius vulgaris,” (299) suggesting that they are one in the same with their venal

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