Natasha's Dance (74 page)

    27.
Akhmatova and Punin in the courtyard of the Fountain House, 1927

    fellow poet, she could draw attention to the way he had defied the authorities by writing about politics and other moral issues in disguised literary forms - much as she was doing in her writing on Pushkin.

    Akhmatova and Shileiko were divorced in 1926. He had been a jealous husband, jealous not just of her other lovers but of her talent, too (once in anger he had even burned her poetry). Akhmatova moved out of the Fountain House, but soon returned to live there with her

    new lover, Nikolai Punin, and his wife (from whom he was separated) in their apartment in its southern wing. Punin was an art critic, a leading figure in the Futurist movement, but, unlike many of the Futurists, he knew the cultural value of the poets of the past. In one courageous article, in 1922, he had even spoken out against Trotsky, who had written an attack in
Pravda
against the poetry of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva (‘internal and external emigrees’) as ‘literature irrelevant to October’.
¹⁸
It was a warning of the terror to come.* ‘What’, asked Punin, ‘if Akhmatova put on a leather jacket and a Red Army star, would she then be relevant to October?’ If Akhmatova was to be rejected, ‘why allow the works of Bach?’
¹⁹

    Despite his commitment to the Futurist group of left-wing artists, Punin’s apartment in the Fountain House retained the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Petersburg. There were always visitors, late night talks around the kitchen table, people sleeping on the floor. Apart from Punin’s former wife, her mother and daughter and a houseworker called Annushka, there were always people staying in the tiny four-roomed flat. By Soviet standards this was far more cubic space than the Punins were entitled to, and in 1931 Annushka’s son and his new wife, an illiterate peasant girl who had come to Petrograd as a factory worker, were moved in by the Housing Committee, and the flat was reassigned as a communal one.
²⁰
Cramped conditions and the crippling poverty of living on Punin’s meagre wages (for Akhmatova herself was earning nothing in the 1930s) imposed a strain on their relationship. There were frequent arguments over food and money which would often spill into the corridor so that neighbours overheard.
²¹
Lydia Chukovskaya describes visiting Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1938, just before she broke up with Punin:

    I climbed the tricky back staircase that belonged to another century, each step as deep as three. There was still some connection between the staircase and her, but then! When I rang the bell a woman opened the door, wiping soap suds from her hands. Those suds and the shabby entrance hall, with its scraps

    * Trotsky’s two articles were published just a fortnight after the expulsion from the country of several hundred leading intellectuals (accused of being ‘counterrevolutionaries’) in September 1921.

    of peeling wallpaper, were somehow quite unexpected. The woman walked ahead of me. The kitchen; washing on lines, its wetness slapping one’s face. The wet washing was just like the ending of a nasty story, like something out of Dostoevsky, perhaps. Beyond the kitchen, a little corridor, and to the left, a door leading to her room.
²²

    The Fountain House was only one of many former palaces to be converted into communal apartments after 1917. The Volkonsky mansion in Moscow, where Princess Zinaida Volkonsky had held her famous salon in the 1820s, was similarly turned into workers’ flats. The Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky lived in one of them in the last years of his life, from 1935 to 1936, after the success of his Socialist Realist novel,
How the Steel Was Tempered
(1932), which sold more than 2 million copies in its first three years and in 1935 earned its author the highest Soviet honour, the Order of Lenin.
²³
Meanwhile, Zinaida’s great-nephew, Prince S. M. Volkonsky, the grandson of the Decembrist, lived in a workers’ communal apartment in the suburbs of Moscow between 1918 and 1921.
²⁴

    Nothing better illustrates the everyday reality of the Revolution than this transformation of domestic space. The provincial gentry were deprived of their estates, their manor houses burned or confiscated by the peasant communes or the local Soviet, and the rich were forced to share their large apartments with the urban poor or to give up rooms to their old domestic servants and their families. This Soviet ‘war against the palaces’ was a war on privilege and the cultural symbols of the Tsarist past. But it was also part of a crusade to engineer a more collective way of life which lay at the heart of the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union. By forcing people to share communal flats, the Bolsheviks believed that they could make them communistic in their basic thinking and behaviour. Private space and property would disappear, the patriarchal (‘bourgeois’) family would be replaced by communist fraternity and organization, and the life of the individual would become immersed in the community.

    In the first years of the Revolution the plan entailed the socialization

    of the existing housing stock: families were assigned to a single room, and sometimes even less, in the old apartment blocks, sharing kitchens and bathrooms with other families. But from the 1920s, new types of housing were designed to bring about this transformation in mentality. The most radical Soviet architects, like the Constructivists in the Union of Contemporary Architects, proposed the complete obliteration of the private sphere by building commune houses
(dom kommuny)
where all property, including even clothes and underwear, would be shared by the inhabitants, where domestic tasks like cooking and childcare would be assigned to teams on a rotating basis, and where everybody would sleep in one big dormitory, divided by gender, with private rooms set aside for sexual liaisons.
²⁵

    Few houses of this sort were ever built, although they loomed large in the Utopian imagination and futuristic novels such as Zamyatin’s We (1920). Most of the projects which did materialize, like the Narkomfin (Ministry of Finance) house, designed by the Constructivist Moisei Ginzburg and built in Moscow between 1928 and 1930, tended to stop short of the full communal form, with private living spaces and communalized blocks for laundries and bath houses, dining rooms and kitchens, nurseries and schools.
²⁶
But the aim remained to marshal architecture in a way that would induce the individual to move away from private (‘bourgeois’) forms of domesticity to a more collective way of life. Architects envisaged a Utopia where everybody lived in huge communal houses, stretching high into the sky, with large green open spaces surrounding them (much like those conceived by Le Cor-busier or the garden city movement in Europe at that time), and everything provided on a social basis, from entertainment to electricity. They conceived of the city as a vast laboratory for organizing the behaviour and the psyche of the masses, as a totally controlled environment where the egotistic impulses of individual people could be remoulded rationally to operate as one collective body or machine.
²⁷

    It had always been the aim of the Bolsheviks to create a new type of human being. As Marxists, they believed that human nature was a product of historical development, and could thus be transformed by a revolution in the way that people lived. Lenin was deeply influenced by the ideas of the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, who maintained that the brain was an electromechanical device responding to external

    stimuli. Sechenov’s materialism was the starting point for I. P. Pavlov’s research on the conditioned reflexes of the brain (dogs’ brains in particular), which was heavily supported by the Soviet government despite Pavlov’s well-known anti-Soviet views. This was where science and socialism met. Lenin spoke of Pavlov’s work as ‘hugely significant for our revolution’.
²⁸
Trotsky waxed lyrical on the ‘real scientific possibility’ of reconstructing man:

    What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a colossal problem which can only be understood on the basis of socialism. We can construct a railway across the Sahara, we can build the Eiffel Tower and talk directly with New York, but surely we cannot improve on man. Yes we can! To produce a new, ‘improved version’ of man - that is the future task of communism. And for that we first have to find out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: ‘At last, my dear
homo sapiens,
I will work on you.’
²⁹

    The artist also had a central role to play in the construction of Soviet man. It was Stalin who first used the famous phrase, in 1932, about the artist as the ‘engineer of the human soul’. But the concept of the artist as engineer was central to the whole of the Soviet avant-garde (not just those artists who toed the Party line), and it applied to many of the left-wing and experimental groups which dedicated their art to the building of a New World after 1917: the Constructivists, the Futurists, the artists aligned to Proletkult and the Left Front (LEF), Vsevolod Meyerhold in the theatre, or the Kinok group and Eisenstein in cinema all broadly shared the communist ideal. All these artists were involved in their own revolutions against ‘bourgeois’ art, and they were convinced that they could train the human mind to see the world in a more socialistic way through new art forms. They viewed the brain as a complex piece of machinery which they could recondition through reflexes provoked by their mechanistic art (cinematic montage, biomechanics

    in the theatre, industrial art, etc.). Since they believed that consciousness was shaped by the environment, they focused on forms of art, like architecture and documentary film, photomontage and poster art, designs for clothes and fabrics, household objects and furniture, which had a direct impact on people’s daily lives.

    The Constructivists were in the forefront of this movement to bring art into union with life. In their founding manifestos, written during 1921, they detached themselves from the history of art, rejecting easel painting and other such artistic modes as individualistic and irrelevant to the new society; as ‘constructors’ and ‘technicians’, they declared their commitment, by contrast, to the design and production of practical objects which they believed could transform social life.
³⁰
To this end, Varvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin designed workers’ clothes and uniforms. Stepanova’s designs, which were strongly geometric and impersonal, broke down the divisions between male and female clothes. Tatlin’s designs subordinated the artistic element to functionality. A man’s spring coat, for example, was designed to be light yet retain heat, but it was made out of undyed material and lacked decorative design.
³¹
Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis used photomontage to smuggle agitation into commercial advertisements and even packaging. El Lissitzky (a late convert to the production art of the Constructivists) designed simple, lightweight furniture capable of being mass produced for standard use. It was versatile and movable, as necessitated by the ever-changing circumstances of the communal house. His folding bed was a good example of the Constructivist philosophy. It was highly practical, a real space-saver in the cramped Soviet apartments, and at the same time, insofar as it enabled the single person to change his sleeping place and sleeping partner, it was designed to be instrumental in the communistic movement to break down the conjugal relations of the bourgeois family.
³²

    The Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement was equally committed to the idea of the artist fostering new forms of social life. ‘A new science, art, literature, and morality’, wrote one of its founders, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in 1918, ‘is preparing a new human being with a new system of emotions and beliefs.’
³³
The roots of the movement went back to the 1900s when the Forward (Vperedist) group of the Social Democrats (Gorky, Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky)

    had set up schools in Italy for workers smuggled out of Russia. The object was to educate a tier of ‘conscious proletarian socialists’, a sort of working-class intelligentsia, who would then spread their knowledge to other workers and thereby ensure that the revolutionary movement created its own cultural revolution. In the Vperedists’ view the organic development of a working-class culture was an essential prerequisite for the success of a socialist and democratic revolution, because knowledge was the key to power and, until the masses controlled it, they would be dependent on the bourgeoisie. The Vperedists clashed bitterly with Lenin, who was dismissive of the workers’ potential as an independent cultural force, but after 1917, when the leading Bolsheviks were preoccupied with the more pressing matter of the civil war, cultural policy was left largely in their hands. Lunacharsky became the evocatively titled Commissar of Enlightenment, while Bogdanov assumed the leadership of the Proletkult movement. At its peak, in 1920, Proletkult claimed over 400,000 members in its factory clubs and theatres, artists’ workshops and creative writing groups, brass bands and choirs, organized into some 300 branches spread across the Soviet territory. There was even a Proletarian University in Moscow and a
Socialist Encyclopaedia,
whose publication was seen by Bogdanov as a preparation for the future proletarian civilization, just as, in his view, Diderot’s
Encyclopedic
had been an attempt by the rising bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France to prepare its own cultural revolution.
³⁴
As one might expect in such a broad movement, there was a great diversity of views on the proper content of this revolutionary culture. The main ideological division concerned the relationship between the new and old, the Soviet and the Russian, in the proletarian civilization. On the extreme left wing of Proletkult there was a strong iconoclastic trend that revelled in the destruction of the old world. ‘It’s time for bullets to pepper museums’, declared Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF, a loose association of Futurists and Constructivists which sought to link the avant-garde with Proletkult and the Soviet state. He dismissed the classics as ‘old aesthetic junk’ and punned that Rastrelli, the great palace-builder of St Petersburg, should be put against the wall (
rasstreliat’
in Russian means to execute). Much of this was intellectual swagger, like these lines from the poem ‘We’ by Vladimir Kirillov, the Proletkult poet: