6

Immortalizing the Revolution:
The Poetry of Mayakovsky

Throughout his life the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was deeply concerned with the problem of death and immortality. He seriously contemplated suicide on a number of occasions, the last in 1930 when he ended his life with a revolver. His poetry was filled with images of death and hopes of resurrection derived from sources as diverse as traditional Christianity and the poetry of Walt Whitman. In his politics he converted to the Bolshevik cause in 1917 with the fervor of a missionary, and he sought to memorialize the revolution through his art. As an innovator he made a major contribution to Russian poetry and language by his novel use of colloquialisms, slang, and archaic words and syntax. His principal contribution to revolutionary art, however, lay in his raising of politics to the level of religious ecstasy in poems such as “V. I. Lenin” and “150,000,000.” For Mayakovsky the Russian Revolution provided an opportunity to immortalize himself through its poetic celebration.

Mayakovsky attained artistic and political immortality only after his own death, when Stalin chose to deify him as a poet laureate of the revolution. During his lifetime he suffered continual frustration and obscurity, both as a self-proclaimed “futurist” and as a Bolshevik fellow- traveler. Only in 1923, at the age of thirty, did he finally achieve widespread recognition by intertwining his personal and political concerns with death and resurrection in what is generally recognized to be his greatest lyric poem, “About That.” The circumstances of this moment of innovation are particularly important; it occurred in the wake of Mayakovsky’s first trip abroad and during a personal crisis in his relations with Lily Brik. This suggests once more the importance of Western ideas and personal concerns in the life of the Russian avant-garde, even after 1917.

I

Christian imagery and the person of Christ form perpetual themes in the poems of Mayakovsky. But it is rarely the Christianity of Russian Orthodoxy; it is, rather, a Christianity of Mayakovsky’s own making, containing elements of mockery and satire along with a sensitivity to the relevance of Christian imagery to the revolution. The promise of resurrection pervades much of his poetry. Christ is sometimes identified with the revolution itself, sometimes with Mayakovsky personally. Both the city and the revolution in Mayakovsky’s poems promise immortality and threaten martyrdom, more than they define any futurist or Bolshevik social or political utopia. Christ stands before Mayakovsky as a man returned from the dead, “escaped from his icon,” as he wrote, reappearing on earth in a manner suggested by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, James Ensor’s painting of “Christ’s Entry into Brussels,” or Alexander Blok’s poem “The Twelve.” He is, in a sense, Mayakovsky himself in a new incarnation.

In Russian poetry before 1914 the theme of immortality was often connected with the stormy revolutionary events of the time. During the summer of 1905 the Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko composed a workers’ song proclaiming “The eternal revolutionary/Spirit calling the body to battle/For progress, for good, for freedom/He is the example of immortality.”¹ The writings of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, as we have seen, were also full of the symbols of revolutionary immortality, suggesting a connection between the revolution and Easter, the revolutionary leader and Christ. The symbolist poetry of Alexander Blok, set in the context of the city, suggested the alienation of modem man by blurring the distinction between the living and the dead. “The living sleep/The dead man rises from the grave/And goes to his bank, and goes to Court, then to the Senate . . . /The whiter the night is, the blacker the malice of the day/And the triumphant pens keep squeaking.”²

The theme of immortality also predominates in the writings of a little-known Russian philosopher of the time: Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1828-1903), the librarian of the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow at the end of the century, who was regarded as a propertyless saint by many intellectuals who knew him. In Fedorov’s view, all men form a community of brothers in time and space, sons of their fathers, and of the Father of all fathers. Man must not await God’s grace, but should act upon the world to improve it through science. Fedorov believed quite literally in a “resurrection of the flesh,” whereby the fathers could be brought back to life by the sons:

The mass of mankind will be transformed from a crowd, a jostling and struggling throng, into a harmonious power when the rural mass or common people (narod) become a union of sons for the resurrection of their fathers, when they become a relatedness, a ‘psychocracy.’³

There was as much scientism as mysticism in Fedorov’s views, a kind of extreme version of the positivist religion that we discussed in the case of Lunacharsky. Ultimately, science would control even the weather and would conquer death itself. The positivists, wrote Fedorov, did not go far enough; they did not believe literally that the dead could be raised. Secular progress was a form of hell, a belief that the living were superior to the dead, the future to the present, the present to the past. Fedorov’s vision was even more utopian. “The doctrine of raising the dead may be called positivism,” he wrote, “but it is a positivism of action.”⁴ Fedorov never concerned himself with the social and political results of this action, considering doctrines such as socialism mere lies. His revolution was more far-reaching in that it promised through science the ultimate sign of man’s dominion over the earth: victory over death.

Walt Whitman was another important influence, reinforcing Mayakovsky’s concern with the theme of immortality. Here again, the young Mayakovsky, unable to read English, derived his Western source through an intermediary, Kornei Chukovsky, the translator of Leaves of Grass (1907). Whitman identified the celebration of himself with the composite American, who appears in his poems as Modern Man, or Everyman, or the hero of the New World; he was enthusiastic about the modern city, science, and industrial democracy—gaining the approval of the futurists—and critical of the “depravity of the business classes”—gaining the approval of socialists. Although Mayakovsky lacked Whitman’s sensual, mystical, and pantheistic side, he embraced his solipsism, his urbanism, and his intimations of resurrection and immortality, as in the verse from Leaves of Grass, “I know that I am deathless.” In the summer of 1913, when Chukovsky was interviewing Mayakovsky in Moscow, the poet accused him of prettifying his Whitman translations, and he recited whole passages aloud from memory. “During one of our later meetings,” Chukovsky recalled, “Mayakovsky asked me about Whitman’s life as if he were measuring it against his own.”⁵

Finally, Russian futurism provided Mayakovsky with another important dimension of immortality. The futurists’ central concern was language, a “revolution of the word,” which they hoped to introduce into Russian society by the use of nonsense, neologism, and argot. They shared with their Italian prototype an enthusiasm for the novel and the young, a rejection of the past, and a heroic disdain for death. The cult of the machine and the city carried with it a sense of the importance of the secular and the present, the here and now, the eternal values of dynamic youth and the uselessness of the aged and the ancient. As a poet, Mayakovsky was tremendously influenced by (and involved in) futurist trans-sense language (zaumnyi yazyk) and the theories of words as independent sound units laid down in Velemir Khlebnikov’s The Word as Such (1913) and Viktor Shklovsky’s Resurrection of the Word (1914). But the desire to make new extended from poetry into life itself; death was to be risked rather than feared.

We shall soon consider all of these remarks in the context of Mayakovsky’s own life. For the moment it is worth noting that while Mayakovsky did not travel abroad before World War I, and while the medium of his art was the Russian language, a number of Western individuals and influences significantly affected his life and his work. Like Tolstoi, he took his Christianity in a far more direct and free- thinking way than allowed by the Russian Orthodox Church and employed its metaphors even as he mocked many of its beliefs. The revolutionary symbolism of Verhaeren and Maeterlinck reached him, albeit second hand, through Blok and the symbolists. Fedorov transmuted the religion of science developed by Comte, Avenarius, and Mach into his own science of regeneration. Chukovsky’s translations gave him access to Whitman, and David Burliuk introduced him to the European sources of what would come to be called Russian futurism. All of these ideas formed the matrix of Mayakovsky’s, world in his youth, and all displayed a concern with death and immortality. They provided him with poetic images to express his continual concern with the theme of death in his own life and with the hope of resurrection through revolution.

II

Mayakovsky belonged to the futurist generation of the avant-garde that launched its cultural offensive against bourgeois society in the years before World War I. Like many other artists of that generation, he came from the southern non-Russian frontiers of the Russian Empire. Mayakovsky was of Russian and Cossack descent on his father’s side and Ukrainian on his mother’s. He spent the first thirteen years of his life in Georgia, where his father was a forest ranger assigned to the tiny settlement of Bagdadi near the town of Kutais. Mayakovsky was born here in 1893, on his father’s birthday. Growing up, he encountered a complex national and linguistic environment. Most of the Mayakov- skys’ friends were not Russian but Georgian or Polish. “In Bagdadi,” his mother later recalled, “all the inhabitants were Georgian and our family was the only Russian one. Our children played with the neighbors and learned Georgian from them.”⁶ Thus Mayakovsky and his two older sisters Olga and Ludmilla grew up with the language duality of Russian provincial life, speaking Russian at home and in school and Georgian at play and in the streets. Unlike many artists of his generation, Mayakovsky was ethnically part Russian, but he shared the larger experience of a non-Russian childhood.

Similarly, Mayakovsky migrated from the village and small town to the city. In the fall of 1902 he entered the gymnasium in Kutais, and by 1905 he was an unusually tall twelve-year-old, joining with other students in singing Georgian revolutionary songs during demonstrations. In 1904 his sister Ludmilla went to Moscow to attend the Stroga- nov School for the applied arts; two years later Mayakovsky’s father died, leaving the family virtually penniless. Mayakovsky and his mother moved to Moscow, where in the summer of 1906 she obtained a government pension of fifty rubles a month and rented an apartment on Malaia Bronnaia Street. As a result Mayakovsky found himself at age thirteen in the big city, virtually on his own, poor and fatherless.

Mayakovsky’s adolescence in Moscow coincided with the emergence of the easel painting avant-garde associated with the Moscow School and the Jack of Diamonds exhibit of 1910-1911. At first he attended a Realschule, rather than the classical gymnasium; in September 1908 he began to audit some evening classes at the Stroganov School, where his sister was enrolled. But he soon became more involved in revolutionary politics than most avant-garde artists of the time. Toward the beginning of 1908 he joined the Bolsheviks and began studying Marxist literature under the tutelage of an older law student, Ivan Karakhan. In March of that year, Mayakovsky, fifteen years old, was arrested during a police raid on a Bolshevik printing press, imprisoned for a brief period, and then put under police surveillance. In January 1909 he was arrested again. Released a month later, he was arrested a third time in July. This time he was put in solitary confinement for several weeks, placed on trial for distributing revolutionary leaflets, and released only in January 1910 to his mother’s custody. This apparently harrowing prison experience was crucial to Mayakovsky, and the metaphor of the iron cage persisted in his later poems. He used his time in prison for self-education, reading symbolist poetry, keeping a notebook of sketches and jottings, and writing his first poems. Faced with the choice between deeper revolutionary commitment and a career as an artist, he now chose art.

Mayakovsky was not much more successful at art than at politics. After several months of studying painting with P. I. Kelin, who prepared art students for the Moscow School, Mayakovsky was advised not to take the entrance examinations. In the summer of 1910 he ignored this advice, took the examinations, failed them, and returned to Kelin for further study. In the autumn of 1911 he managed to pass the entrance requirements and entered a world of drawing lessons, anatomy lectures, and painting exercises, which soon bored him. A fellow student described his paintings as gaudy oils which produced a “rather cheap, superficial effect.”⁷ At eighteen Mayakovsky was one of hundreds of poverty-stricken provincial art students walking the streets of Moscow. At this point he encountered his first patron, David Burliuk.

Burliuk was a central figure in the development of the Russian avant- garde because of his travels in Europe, where he had studied with Azbe in Munich and Cormon in Paris, and because of his father’s money. In 1911 he was a thirty-year-old Ukrainian painter at the Moscow School, who had studied in art schools off and on for at least eight years. Bur- liuk’s father, the bailiff for the estate of Count Mordvinov in the Crimea, provided the mony to educate David and his brothers and sister and to support their art exhibits, among them the Link and the Jack of Diamonds. The Burliuk home became a kind of family art colony, to which David often brought his friends and fellow-students to paint, argue the merits of art, and see photographs of the latest Paris works. Two of the visitors, Velemir Khlebnikov and Benedikt Lifshits, jokingly proposed in the winter of 1911-1912 that David and his friends should constitute a new “ism” in art. Rejecting geotropism, heliotropism, and the more Russian sounding chukuriuk, they hit upon the name Hylea, after the ancient Greek colony on the Dnieper River not far from the estate.⁸ It was Hylea that gave birth to Russian futurism.

Mayakovsky thus by chance entered the world of art and patronage represented by the Europeanized Russian avant-garde. In January 1912 he became friendly with Burliuk, then involved in organizing the second Jack of Diamonds exhibit in Moscow. They agreed that life and art were generally boring. Upon hearing Mayakovsky read one of his poems, Burliuk promptly declared him a genius and offered him fifty kopeks a day so that, in Mayakovsky’s words, “I could write without starving.”⁹ In this manner, the would-be painter became a poet. To an art teacher like Kelin, Burliuk, who carried a lorgnette and sported a red velvet vest, tails, and top hat, was a conceited and untalented dandy. But for Mayakovsky, he was a patron who could turn failure into success, poverty into riches, and poetry into a radical movement: futurism.

III

Some members of the Russian avant-garde invoked another European art movement in 1912 when the Hyleans began to call themselves “futurists.” The St. Petersburg poet Igor Severianin had already proclaimed something called “ego-futurism” in the autumn of 1911, and the Moscow painters Goncharova and Larionov were developing the “force lines” of Boccioni and other Italian futurist painters into a movement of their own, which they called “rayonnism” (luchizm). Now Burliuk, too, wanted an up-to-date movement and asked his friend Benedikt Lifshits to “be our Marinetti.”¹⁰ Burliuk left Russia that spring for a tour of Paris, Milan, Rome, Venice, and Munich, from which he returned laden with futurist manifestoes and photographs of paintings and sculpture. In the autumn of 1912 he and Mayakovsky moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg. In December they printed their own manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which called for an end to traditional art, throwing Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoi overboard from the steamship of modernity. They were joined shortly by two more friends, the linguist Khlebnikov and another art student from Kherson and Odessa, Alexei Kruchenykh. Without leaving Russia, Mayakovsky now found himself surrounded by the influences of Italian futurism, from which Russian futurists drew their initial inspiration.

Mayakovsky’s move to Petersburg in 1912 was part of a general shift of the center of gravity of the Russian avant-garde. Poetry and drama replaced painting as the radical artistic medium, and Petersburg replaced Moscow as the geographic center of the movement. In 1913 Burliuk and his friends joined forces with members of the St. Petersburg Union of Youth against their Moscow rivals, and with some students of the linguist Baudouin de Courtenay. The result was “Russian futurism” in which the dominant art form was poetry; words were declared to be independent of their meaning, new rhythms and rhymes were created on the basis of sight and sound, and a trans-sense language emerged subject to the poet’s own will and often designed to shock middle-class audiences. The futurists took to the streets wearing outlandish dress: Mayakovsky’s yellow tunic, Burliuk’s top hat, and spoons or radishes in buttonholes. They issued manifestoes and painted their faces, employing all means to antagonize the philistines. They threw tea at their audiences, read poetry on street corners, glorified the modem city, and made their life into public theater.

For Mayakovsky, futurism was an ideal movement, fusing his inclination toward rebellion with his enthusiasm for art. Both elements were present in his first play, a tragedy about himself entitled Vladimir Mayakovsky, which was performed under the auspices of the Union of Youth in December 1913 on alternate nights with the futurist production Victory over the Sun. At one level Mayakovsky’s play was a futurist parody of Meyerhold’s symbolist production of Blok’s Balaganchik with its cardboard figures. But even more important was the fact that it made Mayakovsky himself the hero of his own art. The play consisted mainly of Mayakovsky playing himself in various identities: the Man with One Arm, the Old Man with Scrawny Black Cats, and so on. The intent of the play was to scandalize; in this it succeeded admirably, attracting more whistles, jeers, and catcalls than applause. The critic Kornei Chukovsky dismissed it, in Russkoe slovo, as “naive, provincial impressionism.”¹¹ The play did not bring Mayakovsky widespread recognition beyond the coterie of futurists.

At about the same time Mayakovsky also became intrigued with death. Through Chukovsky’s new translations, he found in Whitman a sense of deification of self and a yearning for immortality. In addition, a friend at the Moscow School, Vasily Chekrygin, introduced Mayakovsky to Fedorov’s ideas concerning man’s scientific ability to conquer death and resurrect his dead ancestors. Finally, in 1913 a student in Mayakovsky’s apartment building committed suicide by throwing himself under a train, an incident that deeply depressed Mayakovsky. These developments provided Mayakovsky with a heightened sense of selfimportance and with intimations of death.¹²

The tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky is full of references to death and immortality. “I/may well be/the last poet there is,” Mayakovsky announces to his audience. Revelation and salvation will come not in the pantheistic sensuality of Whitman’s “body electric” but in a similar fusion of the spiritual with the modem and the urban, “our new souls —humming/like the arcs of street lights.” The poet is despondent; in the end he will simply lie down on a railroad track and “the wheel of a locomotive will embrace my neck.” Yet death is treated with irony, and even mockery, despite its apparent finality. “My son is dying,” says the Woman with a Tear in an unconcerned manner; “No trouble/Here’s another tear./ You could put it on your shoe/it would make a fine buckle.” References to death and suicide abound, as, for example, the Man with Two Kisses, who tells the story of “A man who was big and all dirty,” who goes home and hangs himself. Rut death may not be all that final, for Mayakovsky also suggests that one’s soul lives on indefinitely beyond the death of the body, although in new forms, in a manner reminiscent of Whitman’s “No doubt I have died ten thousand times before.” “I’m old,” says the Old Man with Scrawny Black Cats, “a thousand-year-old gaffer.” And Mayakovsky proclaims his own immortality: “I undaunted/have bom my hatred for sunlight through centuries/my soul stretched taut as the nerves of a wire.”¹³ Throughout the poem there lurk, beneath the mechanized trappings of modernity, the spiritual needs of men in a secular age.

The suggestions of suicide, death, and resurrection that appear in Vladimir Mayakovsky were not a passing adolescent mood. Rather, they presaged a theme that Mayakovsky would continually return to and embellish. Many of his themes are common to Whitman and the futurists—the importance of the poet as a symbol of everyman, the enthusiasm for modernity through the machine and the city, and the general sense of man’s power to determine his own future. By 1914 such motifs had been widely publicized by the futurists’ poetry-reading tours of the provincial towns, and the expulsion of Mayakovsky and Burliuk from the Moscow School in February 1914 only added to their notoriety.¹⁴ But it is important to keep in mind that Mayakovsky had hardly achieved success or maturity by 1914, whatever his futurist standing within the avant-garde.

IV

World War I brought death and violence to Europe with unprecedented horror. For Mayakovsky, however, the reality of the trenches was far away. As an only son, he was exempt from the draft, but he volunteered anyway; the Moscow police promptly rejected him because of his political activity and arrest record. On the home front he turned patriotic, publishing anti-German poems and articles for the St. Petersburg journals Nov and Novyi satirikon. He hung out with other bohemians at the Stray Dog cabaret of Boris Pronin, since 1912 a central gathering place for Petersburg artists and intellectuals—Lifshits, Chukovsky, the poets Osip Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova, and Meyerhold. Hundreds of customers often crowded into its two small rooms, decorated with wall paintings by the former Blue Rose artists Sudeikin and Sapunov. Pronin, a former actor, divided the world into two groups: his avant-garde friends and the “pharmacists,” or middle- class and aristocratic patrons who paid outrageous cover charges to mingle with bohemia. But World War I made the Stray Dog seem superfluous, if not immoral and frivolous, and most of its clientele drifted away. “In Russia,” one regular patron noted, “there was hardly enough culture to create something like Montmartre.”¹⁵

In 1915 Mayakovsky adopted a home and a family. For a time he continued to frequent the Stray Dog, where he read poems such as “Mother and the Evening the Germans Killed” and the anti-war “To You!” Here he met Maxim Gorky, who arranged for him to be assigned to the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman when he was finally conscripted in 1915. Gorky praised his poetic talents as revealed in “The Backbone Flute” and introduced him to the family of the poet Osip Brik. Mayakovsky became a regular visitor at the Briks and soon fell in love with Osip Brik’s wife Lily. In Brik he found a new patron to replace David Burliuk, and within a few months he moved into the Briks’ apartment on Zhukovsky Street. In the words of the poet Nikolai Aseev, Mayakovsky “chose a family for himself, into which he flew like a cuckoo, without displacing and making its members unhappy, however.”¹⁶ Mayakovsky’s relationship with Lily Brik brought him depression and thoughts of suicide, which he fought off with cigarettes, alcohol, and poetry. “I do not need you!/I do not want you!,” Mayakovsky wrote in “The Backbone Flute,” “It’s all the same/I know/ soon I’ll die.”¹⁷

Death and resurrection persisted as themes in Mayakovsky’s wartime poetry. The senseless death of war pervades “War and the Universe” and other poems of the period. In the Whitmanesque poem “Man” of mid-1917 Mayakovsky evokes a strong sense of resurrection. In “Man” a poet dies, ascends to heaven, and returns to earth to discover that he is famous and that Zhukovsky Street has been renamed Mayakovsky Street. Yet the world is still dominated by money and the omnipotent Ruler of All. Although the world has given immortality and fame to the poet who shot himself (Mayakovsky may have considered such an act in 1915), little has changed. Such themes suggest a continuing concern with death and a personal despondency.

The March Revolution of 1917 gave Mayakovsky new life. The poet who had considered suicide was ecstatic at the historic events surrounding him. He immediately became involved in the first attempts to organize artists on behalf of the revolution. “Our cause—art,” he told a crowd at the Mikhail Theater, “must mean in the future state the right of free determination for all creative artists.”¹⁸ Like other futurists, Mayakovsky feared that members of the World of Art, who dominated the new Provisional Government’s Commission on the Arts, would seize artistic control. Moscow seemed more receptive to the futurists than Petrograd, and it was there that Mayakovsky and Burliuk organized the “first republican evening of art” in late March 1917. Yet Mayakovsky’s life went on in rather ordinary fashion; he kept his job at the Automobile School until August. In addition, he began turning his art to political use in the manner of Moor, executing a series of colored lubki, which satirized the Old Regime, for one of Gorky’s publishing operations.¹⁹

On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mayakovsky was a twenty- four-year-old poet, enjoying his new freedom under the Provisional Government. He had patrons in Gorky and Brik and a market for his art in the journals of the time. The Briks provided him with a surrogate family. But it was the October Revolution that gave the relatively little- known poet his greatest opportunities for fame and success.

V

“Mayakovsky was saved by the October Revolution,” wrote his friend, the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky. “He enjoyed the Revolution physically. He needed it very badly.”²⁰ Mayakovsky provides the same impression in his carefully constructed autobiography. “To accept it or not? Such a question for me (and for the other Moscow futurists) did not exist. My Revolution.”²¹ Mayakovsky was, in fact, one of the first artists to answer Lunacharsky’s call for support of the Bolsheviks, and he immediately threw himself into artistic proselytizing. Like Whitman, he identified himself with his nation and the turmoil of the time. In 1918 he began to mythologize the revolution, with his play Mystery- Bouffe. He adopted the revolution and made it out to be something quite his own.

Mystery-Bouffe illustrates the technique of myth-making in early Soviet culture. The idea of a revolutionary variety show and poetry reading had been suggested by Gorky in July 1917. But what Mayakovsky produced was quite unique: a religious mystery play about the international proletarian revolution which mocked religion. In Mystery- Bouffe the earth has been destroyed by a flood, and seven pairs of “clean” and “unclean” seek refuge at the North Pole. The unclean proletarians throw the clean bourgeoisie overboard from an ark, take them to hell, become disenchanted with heaven, and return to a communist paradise on earth. As in the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet emerges once again as the “ordinary young man” of “no class/no tribe/no clan” who arrives on the ark to deliver a “new Sermon on the Mount”; he denounces the Christian heaven and predicts an earthly paradise where “you will live in warmth/and light, having made electricity/move in waves.” Despite its antireligious satire, the play abounds in Christian imagery and suggests that the revolution amounts to a kind of rebirth. In the electrified scientific utopia of communism, Mayakovsky announced, the whole world would become “one great commune” where all mankind would find a “new spring” of rebirth.²² In Mystery-Bouffe Mayakovsky greeted the Bolshevik Revolution in terms reminiscent of the very Christianity he mocked.

Mayakovsky first read Mystery-Bouffe aloud, to an audience that included Meyerhold and Lunacharsky, as a play designed to celebrate the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Lunacharsky’s chauffeur liked the play, and so it was assumed to have mass appeal. Yet initially it was a failure. Production was difficult, and many actors refused to perform in it. Meyerhold, the producer, and Malevich, the set-designer, did not get along well with Mayakovsky, the writer. Despite Lunacharsky’s cheerful predictions that Mystery would be a “communist spectacle” that would be “understandable to anyone,” the actors garbled their rhythmically complex verses, Meyerhold complained of a “complete lack of communication,” and only a few futurists reacted favorably to the production. When Mayakovsky later tried to produce the play in Moscow and to make a film of it, the project was rejected by the Moscow Soviet because of what it called the play’s “foggy ideas” and “incomprehensible language for the broad masses.”²³ Intended as mass spectacle, Mystery-Bouffe turned out to be a play by and for a small segment of the Russian avant-garde.

The gap between the futurists and the average Soviet citizen was wide. The futurist journal Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the Commune), financed by the Painting Section of Lunacharsky’s Narkompros in 19181919, functioned more as a haven for the avant-garde than as a service to the revolution. When Mayakovsky proclaimed in an article that “the streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes,” the “our” obviously referred to the futurists rather than to the worker-artists of Proletkult. “Proletarian art,” Brik noted rather cleverly, “is neither ‘art for the proletarians’ nor ‘art of the proletarians,’ but art of the artist-proletarians.” Another contributor, Nikolai Punin, admitted, “We want to build a minority dictatorship, since only a creative minority has sufficiently strong muscles to keep pace with the working class.” This was too much even for Lunacharsky, who warned that the futurists should stop thinking of themselves as “persons of authority” in artistic matters, adding that “not all art is bourgeois and not all bourgeois art is bad.”²⁴ Mayakovsky may have wholeheartedly accepted the Revolution, but the Revolution did not wholeheartedly accept Mayakovsky.

Brik and Punin nonetheless continued to proclaim themselves “builders of proletarian culture” endowed with “revolutionary wisdom,” and to attack both Narkompros and Proletkult. Narkompros artists, they wrote, had a “complete misunderstanding of the revolutionary problems assigned to them,” and Proletkult had no monopoly on true proletarian culture. Accused of imitating Marinetti and the Italian futurists, they retorted that any pre-1914 ties with Europe had been severed, and that Russian futurism was now “isolated along with communism.”²⁵ By the spring of 1919 the futurists had thoroughly alienated Narkompros, and there were no further subsidies. Mayakovsky now left Petrograd for Moscow and committed himself further to the Bolshevik cause.

In the spring of 1919 Mayakovsky turned his art to the service of the Soviet government and thereby found new sources of patronage. At first he participated in Cheremnykh’s workshop along with D. Moor and other artists and began to paint ROSTA windows. In addition, he wrote his first poem glorifying the Bolshevik Revolution, “150,000,000.” Here again, Mayakovsky identified strongly with the anonymous masses of his country; he exhibited his devotion to the collective by not signing his name. His new role as propagandist alienated a number of his avant- garde friends. While Chukovsky saw him as “Isaiah in the guise of an Apache” and an orator who “needs not paper but larynx,” others were less sympathetic. Former allies accused him of selling his soul for 150,000,000 rubles. Lenin attacked what he called “hooligan communism,” and wrote that Lunacharsky should be “whipped for futurism” because he let Narkompros print five thousand copies of Mayakovsky’s poem.²⁶ Intended to illustrate the avant-garde’s support of the Bolsheviks, the poem served only to estrange Mayakovsky from both.

In the case of other artists, we have seen how revolution often provided new opportunities for political conversion and patronage, as well as fame. Mayakovsky’s conversion had yielded money, but not success, and had alienated him from other artists. Critics charged that he had received “fantastic fees” for doing ROSTA windows. Poems published in Izvestiia could not overcome the deep unhappiness and isolation that Mayakovsky expressed in 1921 in his letters to Lily Brik. Many of his friends had emigrated, or assumed the silence of inner exile. Burliuk had left for America, Pasternak and Gorky no longer befriended him, and Blok and Khlebnikov were dead. The utopian phase of War Communism was giving way to the normalcy and profiteering of the New Economic Policy. Futurism as a movement was dead.

It is easy to read back Mayakovsky’s subsequent fame into his early years. Yet from the perspective of the man of twenty-eight who had survived eight years of war, revolution, and civil war, the picture was quite different. Although Mayakovsky had written some of his best poems (“The Backbone Flute,” “War and the Universe,” and “Man”), he was not famous or even widely recognized beyond intellectual circles. Neither the Bolsheviks nor the avant-garde had accepted his personal identification of self and revolution. Mayakovsky’s love for Lily Brik remained a source of personal torment. As of 1921 Mayakovsky had not found the fame he desired.

Yet Mayakovsky’s optimism that the revolution, or at least his revolution, might some day bring about a victory over death remained unbroken. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mystery-Bouffe had revealed his deep concern with the shape of death, with suicide, and with resurrection and the transmutation of self through art and life. The revolution appears to have heightened that concern. In the spring of 1920 the linguist Roman Jakobson observed this mood after returning from a trip to Europe. In the middle of Jakobson’s attempt to explain the recent work of Einstein on general relativity, Mayakovsky suddenly interrupted him: “Don’t you think that in this way we will achieve immortality?” Taken aback, Jakobson let him continue. “I am quite convinced,” said Mayakovsky, “that there will be no death. The dead will be resurrected.” In part, Mayakovsky’s comment reflected his old fascination with the ideas of Fedorov and Walt Whitman. But Jakobson himself was struck by the remark. “At this moment,” he later wrote, “I discovered a quite new Mayakovsky, one who was dominated by the desire for victory over death.”²⁷

VI

Mayakovsky’s moment of innovation, like those of other artists discussed in this book, came about in part because of the influence of Western ideas, novel inside Russia, at a particularly crucial period in his life. To understand the creation of the poem “About That,” it is therefore helpful to sketch briefly the situation in Russian avant-garde art and its relation to Berlin Dada in 1922.

By 1922 the Bolsheviks had become increasingly intolerant of the rebellious activities of the Russian avant-garde. The normalization of economic life under the NEP was accompanied by increasing harassment of both political opponents and intellectuals. Proletkult had long since become a subsection of Narkompros. A number of intellectuals were forced to flee abroad. Tatlin’s art studio was closed down on party orders. Kandinsky and Chagall both returned to Europe, which had nurtured their art before World War I. Thus, at the very time that Soviet Russia was reentering the European community through participation in the Genoa conference on economic reconstruction in the spring of 1922, the last wave of Russian émigrés was moving on Europe.

Political pressure led to new internal rivalries within the avant- garde. The younger generation of artists, whom we have labeled “constructivists,” sought various means to make their art useful to the new society. The actual movement known as “constructivism” emerged in August 1920 in Moscow when two brothers, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, posted their “Realist Manifesto” in the streets and called for a socially useful art of real materials in space, akin to the work of the engineer. Alexander Rodchenko and his wife, Varvara Stepanova, specialists in metalwork and textiles in the Industrial Arts Section of IZO- Narkompros, immediately issued their own “productivist” manifesto. In it they demanded that art serve the needs of the new society by the design of workers’ housing, clothing, stoves, factories, furniture, and eating utensils. In September 1921 they exhibited such objects, together with Alexandra Exter, the architect Alexander Vesnin, and Stepanova’s friend Liubov Popova, in a show of twenty-five works entitled “5X5=25.” As the utilitarianism of the productivists flourished, the earlier aesthetic orientation of constructivism became superfluous.

Another division within the avant-garde was occasioned by the split between Vkhutemas (the Higher Art Studios) and a new art organization known as AKhRR, or the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. Vkhutemas was the central gathering place of the avant-garde during the Civil War, an open and experimental art school created from the faculties of the Moscow School and the Stroganov School in 1918. Vkhutemas was also a hotbed of European modernism, where instructors and students vied in imitating and outdoing the work of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, and the German expressionists. But during the spring of 1922 a number of students left Vkhutemas at the time of an exhibit of Wanderers’ paintings in Moscow and declared themselves in favor of a new “heroic realism” in art. On May 1, 1922, AKhRR held its first exhibit of paintings done inside Moscow factories in order to raise money for relief of the famine then raging in the provinces. Forerunners of the socialist realists of the 1930s, the AKhRR artists reverted to the style of the Wanderers—realistic, national, and popular—and attacked the westernism of Vkhutemas and Narkompros.²⁸

Both productivists and AKhRR artists illustrated the tenuous position of avant-garde artists such as Mayakovsky in 1922. The Soviet government was now choosing to support those artists who represented a new style and a new conformity to desirable canons of realism, mass art, Russian themes, and utilitarian art. The novelty and experimentalism of the Europeanized avant-garde was dated as a product of prewar "bourgeois” society, and criticized as an unnecessary and even dangerous luxury in a socialist society. A number of artists therefore sought refuge in Europe, on either a temporary or a permanent basis. Through them, the old prewar ties between Moscow, Petersburg, Berlin, and Paris were reestablished.

In prewar Germany the center of the German avant-garde had been Munich; in 1922 it was Berlin. Because of political pressure at home, the head of IZO-Narkompros, Lunacharsky’s painter-friend David Shteren- berg, now decided to bring Russian avant-garde art to Europe with an exhibit at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin. The German capital in those days was not only the center of "Weimar culture,” but also the home of numerous Russian émigrés and Russian-language publishing houses. In 1922 it was also a place to “change directions,” a place where Russian émigrés who had fled their homeland mingled with Russian intellectuals living abroad on Soviet passports, and with still other émigrés who, like the writer Aleksei Tolstoi, had decided to return home. Malevich’s friend Ivan Pougny arrived in Berlin in 1920, opened an art studio, and exhibited his works a year later at the Der Sturm gallery. In early 1922 Shterenberg sent El Lissitzky and Naum Gabo to Berlin to join Pougny and to help organize the Van Diemen Gallery exhibit.²⁹

This conjunction of circumstances made Berlin a center of the Russian avant-garde in 1922. Pougny’s studio and the cafés along the Nollendorfplatz became the gathering places of a number of Soviet artists and writers living and traveling abroad. El Lissitzky and the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, in their Berlin journal Veshch (Object), proclaimed that spring that “the blockade of Russia has ended,” and that the “young masters of Russia and the West” would now inaugurate a “new epoch of creativity.”³⁰ Mayakovsky’s friend Viktor Shklovsky arrived in Berlin and began writing his book Zoo. The director Alexander Tairov brought his Chamber Theater to give performances and to arrange for the publication of his book Das Entfesselte Theater. Boris Pasternak and Sergei Esenin were in Berlin, primarily to publish their poetry. In the autumn of 1922 Shterenberg and Nathan Altman came to Berlin to supervise the Van Diemen exhibit.

The Berlin migration of 1922 provided many Russian artists with their first direct contact with German expressionism and the anti-art movement known as Dada. Berlin Dada was an offshoot of the wartime movement, centered in Zurich, which emerged after the abortive German revolution of 1918-1919. Led by the cartoonist Georg Grosz, it was more political than its Swiss prototype; the Berlin Dada artists pasted “Hurra Dada!” posters on police station and cell walls, read poetry at night in the middle of traffic, and publicly attacked every facet of Weimar Germany’s “ruling class.” Like prewar futurism, Dada represented a fusion of artistic and political rebellion against all conventional order and meaning, in both art and life, but with a less optimistic sense of despair and absurdity. Although Berlin Dada was actually in a state of decline by 1922, it was novel to the Russians who encountered it there. Since Lissitzky arranged for the Novembergruppe painters to exhibit in Moscow, and Grosz was a frequent visitor at Pougny’s studio, Berlin Dada was well known among Russian artists by the end of the year.³¹

Berlin Dada provided some unusual examples of artistic innovation, along with its political rebellion. These were generally in the area of book publishing and poster art and involved layout, typography, and “photomontage.” The Berlin Dada artists mixed large and small letters at random on the page, made faces out of typed words, spouted nonsense language in public, and juxtaposed pasted objects on paper for shock effect. The founder of the Berlin journal Der Dada was the Vienna-born Raoul Hausmann. Beginning in 1918 Hausmann had worked on what he called “photomontage,” the combining of cut-out photographs into a kind of collage:

This process was called photomontage because it embodied our refusal to play the role of the artist. We regarded ourselves as engineers, and our work as that of construction: we assembled (in French: monter) our work, like a fitter.³²

Such a view of art as construction and rearrangement of constituent elements into a new whole fit well with what we have called the “constructivist” element in Russian avant-garde art. As early as 1920 Hausmann had done a photomontage of Tatlin and his monument to the Third International, and the Berlin Dada artists greatly admired the constructivist elements in Tatlin’s “machine art” without knowing much about it. Berlin Dada journals were full of photomontages and visual collages by 1922, and provided a novel influence on a number of Russian artists, among them the painter Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and the film director Sergei Eisenstein. Montage was a staple of Berlin Dada long before Eisenstein theorized about it in Mayakovsky’s journal LEF in 1923-

We are now in a position to understand the significance of Mayakovsky’s trip to the West in 1922. To be sure, exile and travel abroad often breed patriotism even when times are difficult in one’s own country. “Only abroad,” wrote the poet Sergei Esenin of his trip to Europe in 1922, “did I understand how great are the merits of the Russian Revolution which has saved the world from a horrible spirit of philistinism.” Mayakovsky’s experience was likewise reinforcing of his Russian loyalties. “I went to Paris trembling,” he later wrote of his first visit in October 1922 at the age of twenty-nine; “I saw everything with a schoolboy’s diligence. What if we turn out to be provincial again?” His whirlwind week in Paris with Elsa Triolet, Lily Brik’s sister, included visits to nightclubs, the Louvre, the studios of Léger and Picasso, the Eiffel Tower, the metro, restaurants and clothing stores; all seemed to indicate the decadence of capitalist society and the fresh possibilities of the Soviet experiment. “Before the war,” Mayakovsky remembered, “schools and art trends came into being, lived, and died to the orders from artistic Paris.”³³ The futurist generation of the avant-garde had found its artistic innovations in Paris; the generation of the constructivists would seek its own revolutionary paths.

Like Paris, Berlin in 1922 also provided Mayakovsky with a good deal of material for his art, despite his pejorative comments about the West. The city itself, with its factories, its bustle, its great zoo, and its elevated railways, provided a background which would emerge in his poetry. At the Café Leon in the Nollendorfplatz he found receptive audiences of both Russians and Germans, equally impressed by his poems and his news of revolutionary Russia. The typographical experiments and photomontage of Berlin Dada were also of great interest to him, and within a few months he incorporated them into the pages of his own new journal Left Front, or LEF. Most important, he had a chance to meet in person the kindred spirits of the Berlin avant-garde (John Heartfield, Hausmann, and Grosz) and to return to Russia with their journals and drawings, including a copy of Grosz’s bitter and satirical Ecce Homo.³⁴ All of this helped give Mayakovsky a sense that the Russian avant-garde was part of a larger revolt against the wealth and banality of bourgeois society. It also helped provide the immediate setting for and the most recent experience prior to the composition of his greatest lyric poem.

Mayakovsky’s “moment of innovation” followed almost immediately upon his return from Western Europe. While his contacts with Berlin Dada and his European trip formed an important background, the timing appears to have been largely the result of personal considerations. In December 1922 Mayakovsky had a major quarrel with Lily Brik, and they agreed to part company for two months, from December 28, 1922, to February 28, 1923. During this period Mayakovsky worked for some five hundred hours over a thirty-five-day span to produce what most critics consider his greatest lyric poem, entitled “About That” (Pro Eto). It was a time of agonizing self-imprisonment; he drank continuously, saw almost nobody, and left his room only when absolutely necessary. For weeks Mayakovsky worked out his emotions on paper in three separate versions of the poem which moved progressively away from thoughts of death and suicide to hopes for resurrection. In “the most important letter of my life,” written to Lily Brik in early January 1923, Mayakovsky told her, “You will get to know a completely new person, as far as you are concerned. Everything that will happen between you and him will now be based not on past theories, but on deeds from February 28 on, your ‘deeds’ and his.”³⁵

The poem “About That” reveals Mayakovsky’s concern with death and immortality in even greater intensity than the earlier poems we have discussed. A major theme of the poem is the tension between the individual and society, between personal love and the revolution. As usual, it is autobiographical. Reminiscent of the frustrated lover who nearly jumped into the Neva River seven years earlier, the poem’s main character is a man who reappears in various metamorphoses, as a polar bear on an ice floe, as a poet-revolutionary who resembles Jesus Christ, and as a young man who has left his family but is returning to his mother’s home for Christmas. It recalls the transmigration of souls in Whitman and the lines from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” probably obtained from Chukovsky’s recent translation of Oscar Wilde: “For he who lives more lives than one/more deaths than one must die.” The poem is a summation of Mayakovsky’s past life, and of his hope for a new one. He appears to be at a point of self-transformation. Images of crucifixion and resurrection appear throughout the poem, and Christ appears as a Komsomol member in an apparent parody of Alexander Blok. The significance of his recent travels with the Briks to Paris and Berlin emerges in his images of the Seine, the Oder, the Café Rotonde, and the Berlin Zoo. The poet will be resurrected four times before he actually dies, Mayakovsky tells the reader in reference to possible suicide attempts; his personal love has been unfulfilled, and now he must find a new role and a new life in the new society, even if as a porter or zoo-keeper. The poem ends with the desperate cry: “Resurrect me!”³⁶

The poem “About That” thus reflects a turning point in Mayakovsky’s life, a break with his past, a rejection of suicide, and a hope for a new start. Probably suicide was on his mind not only because of his despair over Lily Brik, but because his old friend from the Moscow School, Chekrygin, had been run over by a train in 1922, a probable suicide.³⁷ In Mayakovsky’s mind Chekrygin, the student who had introduced him to the ideas of Fedorov and the painter of Christ’s resurrection, had now chosen the same way out as the student in Mayakovsky’s apartment in 1913, when he was writing Vladimir Mayakovsky. Yet the poem clearly moves away from despair to optimism. In part this may have been caused by the good news in January 1923 that Mayakovsky had been granted permission to edit his new journal, LEF. After publishing frustrations and public attacks on his poems, this must have come to Mayakovsky as a great relief and a sign of hope. One can only speculate. When the first issue of LEF appeared in March 1923, its contents included the poem “About That.”

Montage by Alexander Rodchenko, for the first edition of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem. About That (Pro Eto), Petrograd, 1923.

“About That” was innovative in its poetic qualities and in its explicit articulation of the theme of immortality of self hinted at in earlier works. The journal LEF also marked a new beginning in Mayakovsky’s art, a rallying point for the Russian avant-garde, based in part on the model of Berlin Dada. Its reference to “art objects” reminded the reader of Lissitzky’s Berlin journal Veshch. The leading contributors—Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Brik, and Nikolai Aseev—had been in Berlin in the autumn of 1922 and were familiar with Dada journals and techniques. The artist Rodchenko specifically imitated the layout and illustrations of Hausmann and Der Dada; he also employed the technique of photomontage in the pictures accompanying “About That,” which showed, among other things, Lily Brik amid the polar bears of the Berlin Zoo. And like Mayakovsky himself, the journal’s first editorial vowed, “We will purge ourselves (ochistim) of the old ‘we.’”³⁸ Both the poem “About That” and the journal LEF marked a new beginning in Mayakovsky’s life and art after another apparent brush with suicide.

Only in 1923 did Mayakovsky work out a satisfactory relationship to the Bolshevik Revolution. Neither his futurist antics nor his Civil War propaganda had produced such a relationship, the first because they antagonized political authority and the second because it served that authority all too well for the integrity of the artist. Now in LEF he had found an independent journal acceptable to both the regime and his friends among the avant-garde, and he could try once again to achieve the balance between individual need and social demands articulated in “About That.” In Berlin in 1922 he had seen an example of independent artists creating a radical art in bourgeois society; LEF now followed that example in Soviet Russia. In Moscow he had gone through two months of isolation and agony, which had ended with his greatest work of art, a work pervaded with themes of revolutionary immortality.

VII

At the age of thirty Mayakovsky finally achieved the fame he had so long desired. With the launching of LEF, the death of Lenin in January 1924, and Mayakovsky’s eulogy of him in the poem “Vladimir Il’ich Lenin,” the poet’s name became a household word in Soviet Russia. He signed autographs, was recognized by people on the street in Moscow, and read his poems throughout the country to large audiences. When Mayakovsky visited New York in August 1925, it seemed to his old friend David Burliuk that he was “just as young, throws the bricks of his jokes around just as before. There is nothing strange in this. After all, he is only thirty. And who will be weighed down by fame, even if world fame, at the happy age of thirty?”³⁹

Fame did not end Mayakovsky’s thoughts of suicide or his poetic quest for some kind of immortality. His poetry came under increased criticism in the late 1920s as the work of “an extreme individualist and an egocentric,” a man who wrote less about the revolution and more about his own love affairs, a throwback to the prewar futurists. By 1927 the LEF was losing both money and contributors; Gorky called it a “nihilistic requiem.” “Your poems are too topical,” shouted a hostile listener at one of Mayakovsky’s poetry readings; “tomorrow they will be dead. You will be forgotten. You will not be immortal.” To which Mayakovsky replied: “Please drop in a thousand years from now, we’ll talk then!” The critic Viacheslav Polonsky saw in Mayakovsky “the revolt of a bohemian who was himself a refined, subtle, sharpened bourgeois.” The futurists, he wrote in Izvestiia, have simply outlived themselves; “we will not let them be resurrected.”⁴⁰ Yet resurrection, as we have seen, was precisely what Mayakovsky articulated in his poetry.

Vladimir Mayakovsky in Berlin, 1923. From L. Maiakovskaia, O Vladimire Maiakovskom: Iz vospominanii sestry (Moscow, 1968).

Mayakovsky’s new career was also marked by more frequent trips to the West, including not only Berlin and Paris but also Mexico and the United States (1925). Returning from these travels, he would often import the latest innovations in Western art. Rodchenko recalled the results of these trips :

Mayakovsky often travelled abroad, on the average of four times a year. After each journey he would bring back suitcases filled with books, periodicals, advertising materials, posters, photographs, postcards and reproductions of art works. After making use of them in the press, he would distribute all the materials to his friends according to their particular interests. This distribution took place in the room of Osya [Osip Brik] which took on the appearance of a store. Zhemchuzhny took materials relating to theatre and the cinema, Lavinsky—those dealing with architecture and sculpture, and I took art and photography. He gave me many monographs on Grosz, Larionov, Goncharova, Delaunay, Rousseau’s ‘Negroes,’ Picabia, A. Lothe, V. Grigoriev, Picasso. Once he brought from Paris photographic paper, a gift to me from the famous Man Ray. That was an innovation at the time—paper on a transparent base. Man Ray made photograms. On another occasion he gave me two Picasso lithographs which he had received from the artist personally. In this way, thanks to Mayakovsky, we had a steady flow of information on the culture and art of the West. And he brought with him not only the West’s art, but its life, atmosphere and daily affairs with all its rays and shadows.⁴¹

Mayakovsky’s 1922 exposure to Berlin Dada was thus only the beginning of his enthusiasm for European artistic modernism. In this way the LEF circle served much the same function as the prewar Hyleans in adopting the poses of the European avant-garde. Generally in their late twenties or early thirties, members of the LEF circle served as a crucial link between the Westernism of the Silver Age and the revolutionary constructivism of the 1920s.⁴² This is not to say that Mayakovsky should be considered a “westemizer”; but neither should he be thought of as simply a revolutionizer of the Russian literary language uninfluenced by foreign developments.

In 1927 Mayakovsky once more began to approach the sense of imprisonment and desperation that had gripped him in 1922. At the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the poet represented a kind of embarrassment to the regime. Like Trotsky, who was about to be hounded into exile by Stalin, Mayakovsky was a reminder of revolutionary idealism and freedom at a time of approaching dictatorship and uniformity. As such, he was increasingly attacked in the press by official writers’ organizations. Under pressure to conform, he returned to the theme of death and immortality, which had pervaded his earlier works. In 1928 he wrote The Bedbug, a play in which the frozen body of the hero, Prisypkin, is resurrected decades after his death, in 1979, in a manner reminiscent of Fedorov and modern cryogenics; Prisypkin discovers that he is caged in a zoo as a freak example of immortality. In 1929 Mayakovsky confided to a friend at a poetry-reading in Dynamo Stadium: “To write an excellent poem and read it here—then one can die.”⁴³

On January 30, 1930, Mayakovsky’s new play The Bathhouse had its premier in Leningrad. In it the inventor of a time machine, Chudakov, is continually frustrated by a party hack, Pobedonosikov, whose name recalled the hated Procurator of the Holy Synod under Alexander III. The reviews were sharply critical, and Mayakovsky was told to revise the script. Even as a twenty-year exhibit of his work was being shown in Moscow, he felt compelled to join the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) in order to go on writing. “I’m fed up,” he told a friend at the time; “fame, like the beard of a dead man, will grow on me after death. While I am alive I shave it.”⁴⁴ On April 14,1930, Mayakovsky shot himself in his room, leaving behind a note:

Stalin provided the public eulogy, but Boris Pasternak best expressed the private remembrance of the poet who had finally chosen death: “His face restored the time when he called himself the beautiful twenty- two year old, because death had stiffened the facial expression, which hardly ever gets into its clutches. It was the expression with which one begins life, not the one to end it.”⁴⁵

Mayakovsky’s concern with death and immortality was lifelong, although it apparently achieved a personal and political intensity for him in 1922-1923. The historian can only speculate about how his unhappy personal life, from the death of his father through his frustrating love for Lily Brik, contributed to his continuing thoughts of suicide and his receptivity to the theme of immortality in Whitman and Federov. He never married or sired children, so that concern for immortality ultimately centered on himself and his poetry. A member of the prerevolutionary avant-garde, he was a highly original poet of the Russian language, who was continually receptive to influences from abroad. Christianity, the pantheism of Whitman, and Fedorov’s positivist hope of literal resurrection all provided him with death-defying motifs for his poems. In them he could create a self that was beyond time, eternal, continually reborn in new forms. In “About That” he fused his personal quest for transcendence with the revolutionary quest for transformation, his private and public search for immortality. His identification of himself with Russia, the revolution, and the masses in “150,000,000” recalls the immortalization of the self through the collective preached by Lunacharsky more than the mystical leap into the “fourth dimension” of Malevich. Perhaps this enabled him to embrace death as intensely as he had long embraced life.