58

p When the cruiser Aurora fired its historic salvo on October (November yth), 1917, announcing the start of the socialist revolution, many writers of the older generation felt too confused to face up to the changing world. A few days later, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Education, decided to assemble the writers in order to find a common language with the Russian intelligentsia. Only a few people turned up. Among them were Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

59

p Blok was a subtle lyricist, a man of tremendous sensibility who keenly felt the crises and contradictions of the age. His poem The Twelve is the music of the times, a dream of beauty which is the soul of a popular revolution.

p Blok was only 41 when he died in 1921. What he had not had time to say about the Revolution was expressed by Mayakovsky.

p When anyone mentions the name Mayakovsky, I automatically think of the word “revolution”, by association. The reader of his unconventional poetry, packed with politics and topical events, will surely say: “Yes, a poet like that could only live in a period of radical change in social relations.”

p I saw Mayakovsky for the first time at a sailors’ gathering in Petrograd in the winter of 1918. He was reading his Left March. With his deep, thundering voice he managed to outshout the noisy audience who were in no mood to listen to poetry. Most of the sailors had come there to have a dance with their girls. But gradually they began to listen, captivated by the power of Mayakovsky’s faith in his convictions, his drive and his revolutionary verve. I made his personal acquaintance later, in 1920, and often met him between then and his tragic death. The literary group he headed, known as “LEF”, was probably closer to the Party line than the group of constructivists in which I played the role of theoretician and ideologist. In the second half of the 19203 we had many disputes with the former group. However, this did not prevent us becoming friends, especially as I started on my literary career under Mayakovsky’s wing, so to speak, writing for his magazine. He had a peculiar attraction that none could resist. His personal charm was compounded of a variety of qualities: he was full of youthful daring, a gentleman, and a man of revolutionary honour.

p Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in Bagdadi, a small village in the valley of the Rion River in the Caucasus. His father was a forester and died young. Soon after his death the family moved to Moscow. As a boy of fifteen Mayakovsky joined an underground socialdemocratic circle. He was arrested for distributing proclamations and kept in prison for eleven months, and this experience left a deep impression in his mind.

p Mayakovsky studied painting, but became a poet. He began writing in 1912 during a new upswing in the social movement. He appeared on the literary scene as a futurist breaking with the aesthetic canons of conventional art. But his example shows that Russian reality gave a different content to literary movements which sprang up simultaneously throughout Europe. Mayakovsky’s futurism had no relation to the futurism of the Italian poet Marinetti. The Russian futurists did not make a cult of machines, speed, or military power. In short, they did not cultivate the aesthetics of aggression.

60

p Mayakovsky’s poetry was centred on Man. He was full of compassion for Man. “I’m there where it hurts, everywhere,” he said in his early poetry. “I’m all injury and pain”, “nothing but heart wounds everywhere”. He was not a direct successor to nor a follower of Gorky, and it would be stretching a point to call them the representatives of the same school, for they had nothing in common as far as style was concerned. Yet they were close in spirit. What they did have in common was their militant revolutionary humanism. They joined hands on the flagpole of the banner carried aloft by Russian literature and inscribed with the words: “Fight for Man Who’s Worthy of the Name!”

p A book of Mayakovsky’s verse with the intrigueing title As Plain As a Moo came out during World War I. The poetry included in this volume expressed a wide range of emotions: from anguish to protest, oratorial fervour and anger. It denounced “bedroom” lyricism and decadence. Mayakovsky began his famous poem Cloud in Trousers with the lines:

I’ll tease your thought,
          daydreaming on a softened brain,
Just like a bloated lackey,
          lolling on a greasy couch,
I’ll tease it with a rag torn from my bleeding heart,
With insolence and spite,
          until I’ve had my grouch....

He was indeed a poet with a “bleeding heart”, an apostle of the new religion which preached complete renewal.

p Still, his entire pre-revolutionary output makes up just one of the thirteen volumes comprising his collected works. Mayakovsky is very much our contemporary, a poet of the popular struggle for socialism. Just as the wind helps the eagle to straighten out its wings, so did the Russian Revolution of October 1917 help to shape Mayakovsky’s talent and make him into a fully-fledged poet. The masses were his family. Promoting inspired inventiveness was his passion. Starting people off on a new way of life, purged of all past filth, was his purpose. “Comrades! To the barricades! To fight for hearts and souls!" he called. He put people’s dream of the ideal man into words. The way to the achievement of this ideal, he realised, lay through popular struggle. Although it meant bloodshed and great sacrifices, the struggle was unavoidable. Thus he understood his mission as a poet of the Revolution, and awareness of his responsibility determined the character of his work.

p There have, of course, been other great poets in world literature who glorified liberty and man freed from his chains. Rousseau, 61 Byron, Lermontov, Heine, Walt Whitman, Petofi, Hugo and many others expressed in their poetry mankind’s age-old dream of a free and noble man, at the same time reflecting the historical essence of their period and a definite stage in the development of society. We speak of them as the poets of freedom.

p However, no words are more over-used than freedom, humanism, and affinity with the people. What made Mayakovsky a great poet of the proletarian revolution was that the object of his poetry was not man in general (as with Walt Whitman), nor even the man who protests (as with Byron), but the man who fights for the liberation of mankind. With Mayakovsky, all these words—freedom, humanism, affinity with the people—acquire a new historical meaning, expressing the interests of the progressive circles of society. This is what enabled Mayakovsky to create a new kind of poetry. This is why he sings a hymn not to some abstract, free man, but to the man in socialist society. Whereas before Mayakovsky the tendency in Russian poetry had been to set the individual apart from the state, with Mayakovsky we find precisely the opposite desire to merge the state and the individual into one.

p He said:

p Let Gosplan  [61•1 
        debating from dusk till dawn,
My yearly assignment set.
And let the people’s commissar
The thought of the times direct.

p He visualised poetry not as a “sweet-smelling bunch of pinks”, nor as Baudelaire’s “black flowers of evil”, nor even as Promethcus’s proud challenge to the world. For him a poet was a soldier, a worker at his lathe.

p A Russian national poet, Mayakovsky championed a new type of patriotism which was inalienable from the cause of building socialism in Russia. Each of his verses gives you a charge of energy directing your actions and thoughts, and in each of his words—condensed and positioned with a powerful hand—you seem to feel the presence of this big, broad-shouldered man, striding into the future.

p Mayakovsky’s poetry represents a unique chronicle of revolutionary events from 1917 to 1930 (the year he died). It made no difference to him whether the theme happened to be “lofty” or “lowly”. He wrote about everything under the sun that was topical in those 62 days: the state loan, a factory worker moving into a new flat, the conference in Genoa (at which he imagined himself representing the people’s interests), rubber dummies for village babies, love and friendship, the death of Yesenin, and literary debates. He ripped every theme apart in order to show the seed of poetry inside it, a glimpse of the road leading into a radiant future, and its appeal to the revolutionary conscience of men, mobilising their strength.

p In his moving poem Vladimir llylcb Lenin Mayakovsky succeeded in creating a monumental image of Lenin moulded by history itself, and also in conveying the people’s boundless love for their leader. The poem Find expresses the jubilant feeling of people who have won freedom with their own hands and have built up their own state.

p Mayakovsky’s poetic images are like Cyclopean structures. Hyperbole and extravagant metaphors are piled on top of one another. Every word and rhyme is packed with meaning and feeling. His comparisons, his neologisms and his metre are strikingly bold. Gogol used to say that Derzhavin (a prominent poet in the reign of Catherine the Great) used hyperbole and allegory as a “supernatural force" which rendered a figure “so very much alive that it seemed to stare at you with a thousand eyes”. Mayakovsky’s images also look at you with a thousand eyes. Some appalled by the tragedy of life, others glowing with affection for people, and still others shining excitedly from the sheer joy of being alive. Like Gogol’s prose, Mayakovsky’s poetry is alternately ironical and lyrical. Irony and satire, which Mayakovsky called his pet weapons, give his poetry its special colouring and its ode-like, emotional tone.

p For all its formal innovation, Mayakovsky’s poetry echoes many of the themes and sentiments of the 19th-century Russian classics. I think I can say with all justice that no poet has ever expressed the revolutionary sweep, the generosity, daring and courage of the Russian nature as powerfully as Mayakovsky. He was a Russian through and through.

p After everything that has been said here, Mayakovsky’s suicide may seem to defy explanation. It happened on April 14, 1930. People often ask why he did it. Why did Mayakovsky, whose whole poetic output was directed towards the goal of communism and served the one aim of building a new society, why did this poet who called himself an agitator, a brawler, a ringleader, and who really did invent new poetic forms that brimmed with revolutionary boldness, why did this man suddenly kill himself?

p In a letter written just before his suicide he wrote that he was doing it for personal reasons: “My love boat has been smashed against the commonplaces of life,” “I wouldn’t advise others to do it.”

63

p For his last poem In full Voice addressed to his “comrade descendants" he found some powerfully penetrating words which reveal to some extent what he was feeling then:

p Scribbling love songs for you
          would suit me as well,
Even better—
          for pleasure and purse.
But I,
      I’d trample,
          My voice to quell On the throat of my own verse.

p Further on he says:

p A poet licked away
          consumptives’ clots,
With the rough tongue
          of posters that he made.

p I think that Mayakovsky was being unfair to himself when he said this. He was a tribune of the socialist revolution in the full meaning of the word, so what other “song” can we associate with him? Various remarks of his and lines of his poetry have become proverbs and slogans. His statue in the square named after him in Moscow is the meeting place of young poets who consider themselves his successors and heirs to his revolutionary boldness and energy.

p Mayakovsky said about himself:

p I love the hugeness of our plans,
The boldness of our mile-long strides.

p We shall probably be nearest the truth if we put Mayakovsky’s suicide down to extreme nervous stress.

p He was a true townsman, he was well-travelled in Europe, and had also taken a trip to Mexico and the United States. He was a living embodiment of the revolution itself with its lust for life and world-sweeping energy. Mayakovsky was immensely proud of being a citizen of the Soviet Union (remember his Poem About the Soviet Passport). He never worshipped bourgeois culture even in those years of near chaos, when little had yet been built and poverty and destitution pecked out of every unmcnded hole. It was Mayakovsky who wrote: “We Soviet people have our own special pride: we look down our noses at the moneybags.” His satirical plays The Bedbug and The Bath-house, in which he takes a vicious stab at bureaucracy, are playing to full houses to this day.

p In his lifetime his physical hugeness formed a sort of barrier to my understanding him, and I suspect I was not the only one affected 64 like that. Russians have a preconceived notion that all big men have big hearts. These bogatyrs can cross themselves with a 50 Ib. weight in their hand, yet they wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone harm a single hair on a child’s head. We were like children, making a nuisance of ourselves and wanting him to bounce us on his knee. We tugged and pulled at him, and never let him alone. Everything about him was huge: his height, his hands, his feet, his close-cropped head, and his eyes which were so bulging and attentive that they seemed to absorb whatever they were peering at. Alexander Fadeyev in his novel The Rout wrote that Levinson’s eyes made Morozko think of strange lakes. Why strange? Because you can go on and on gazing into them without ever being able to fathom them. Fadeyev puts it very neatly. Mayakovsky’s eyes were also like strange lakes. It was the strong undertow or the magnet in them that drew you on, sucking you in with all you contained. All his features were prominent: forehead, nose and chin.

p I repeat, in his lifetime I did not understand Mayakovsky, and I am sure I was not the only one.

p His powerful physique concealed a tenderness and an extraordinary sensitiveness. He was a very intelligent man. His intellect had such a vast range that it seemed to embrace the life of millions of people. It was an intelligence that stretched beyond the horizon, as it were.

p The next most amazing thing about Mayakovsky was his nobility and delicacy of soul. He was noble in the fullest sense of the word. In this respect he was indeed a bogatyr, and we were mere children playing with him. I never saw him go to pieces or even show that he was badly upset. But I did hear from two women who knew him well that they had seen him sobbing. In his recollections Gorky also says that after reading his Cloud in Trousers Mayakovsky burst into tears. This is something one has to know in order to really understand Mayakovsky, to appreciate his self-control and his respect for other people which made him try so hard not to break down in public. Mayakovsky could deafen an audience with his thundering voice and for all his self-control suddenly burst into tears.

p We once sat together on the executive bureau of the first federation of Soviet writers in which the different movements and groupings were represented. There were the RAPP  [64•1  members (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) and the “village-oriented” writers and poets. Leonid Leonov, whose face had a sculptural expressiveness, and Abram Efros, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles 65 and a well-groomed beard, represented the Writers’ Union. There too, Mayakovsky could be a different person. Perhaps what impressed me most strongly was that this loud-voiced heavyweight, who could magnetise an audience weighing a thousand tons, could become transformed into the most vulnerable and delicate of men. When speaking with someone, he would finger the chords of the other’s soul with the gentle touch of a doctor, for fear that he might cause them harm. There was the Mayakovsky famous for his thundering voice, and another Mayakovsky, shy and thoughtful, and yet another Mayakovsky—meek and apologetic. I knew him like that too.

p There is a shorthand record (unedited) of one of Mayakovsky’s last public appearances in which he recalled his reading of In Full Voice at a conference of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers, and asked me afterwards what I thought of it, to which I had replied that it had sent shivers down my spine.

p At this conference (which, if my memory doesn’t fail me, was held on February 6, 1930) Mayakovsky read his poem with a note of challenge, and also with great anguish. He had the look of a man taking aim at a distant target, firing over the nearer ones.

p The constructivists held a meeting of their own the night before at the Business Club in Myasnitskaya Street (now Kirov Street). There we decided that Bagritsky and Lugovskoi would join the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Lugovskoi prepared for the occasion with solemn eloquence, while Bagritsky took it as a matter of course and even as a nuisance, judging by his snappish tone.

p Thus the three of them—Mayakovsky, Lugovskoi and Bagritsky—were admitted to the Association that same evening, having written more or less uniform applications. Leopold Averbach who presided did not conceal his satisfaction and positively glowed with delight as he glanced about him through the thick, gleaming lenses of his pince-nez. Mayakovsky read his poem, drumming with his fingers on the green baize table and glancing now and again at a piece of paper in his hand (obviously he had not yet memorised the poem). He read with inspiration and bitterness in a resonant voice that drowned out all the other sounds:

p I do not care a damn
          for bronze piled up in tons. .. .
Let socialism built in battle
Stand as a common monument
          to all of us!

p He was wholly obsessed with one subject all his life. He never stopped thinking about it. It was always there at the back of his 66 mind when he sat silently at a meeting, thundered at an audience, joked or brooded. This subject can hardly be called simply politics. It spread out like circles on a pond. Thinking of politics he began to think of people, then of mankind, and then of the beauty and goodness of life. He gave a political interpretation to everything, to people, events, and his own poetry.

p He never accepted compromise. Never a concession! And he rendered the atomic fire of the epoch of transition from one social system to the other more compellingly than any other poet.

p Mayakovsky has won world-wide recognition, and his popularity will grow with the ages. He is, to quote Gogol, “visible from far away, from all the corners of the earth".

p Mayakovsky once said to Aseyev, and later repeated it to me almost word for word, that if the Party needed him to he would be willing to start writing in iambs. Another time he said that he had placed his pen in service. . . “mind you,” he added, “in the service of the moment”. This, coming from a poet who attached the greatest importance to the form of expression! He treated words like a lion tamer, making them turn somersaults and chasing them about. He also invented new words. Was it not Mayakovsky who said he was afraid that poetry might be reduced to “cracks from the gallery and the nonsense of a ditty".

p But when politics called him, he threw all other considerations overboard. I think he was prompted by a magnificent anger at anything that might hamper the achievement of communism. Like Cyclops he could hurl rocks. And when he felt some personal weakness getting in his way, he was even capable of turning this anger against himself.

p I’d trample,
          my voice to quell,
                    on the throat of my own verse.

p He was something of a fanatic in this, like Father Avvakum, one of the founders of the Old Believers’ sect in Russia in the iyth century, who was as frenziedly irreconcilable and chose to be burnt alive rather than renounce his beliefs. The main thing for him was “the red of his republic’s flag”, and it was constantly on his mind. Probably the only other writer who could have put it like that and who had felt like that was Nikolai Ostrovsky.

The Revolution shaped some amazing characters. They were not fanatics: their spirit was fantastically fired with enthusiasm. And Mayakovsky was one of those at whom people will never cease to marvel.