Natasha's Dance (78 page)

    29.
Alexander Rodchenko: illustration from Mayakovsky’s
Pro eto
(1923)

    tiny room while his lover Lily carries on with her busy social and domestic life, dreams about a poem he wrote before 1917 in which a Christ-like figure, a purer version of his later self, prepares for the coming revolution. The despairing hero threatens to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Neva river: his love for Lily compli-

    cates his own crisis of identity, because in his imagination she is tied to the ‘petty-bourgeois’
byt
of Russia in the NEP, which has diverted him from the ascetic path of the true revolutionary. This betrayal leads to a dramatic staging of the narrator’s crucifixion, which then gives way to the redemptive vision of a future communist Utopia, where love is no longer personal or bodily in form but a higher form of brotherhood. At the climax of the poem the narrator catapults himself a thousand years into the future, to a world of communal love, where he pleads with a chemist to bring him back to life:

    Resurrect me -

    I want to live my share! Where love will not be - a servant of marriages,

    lust,

    money. Damning the bed,

    arising from the couch, love will stride through the universe.
⁸³

    In 1930, at the age of thirty-seven, Mayakovsky shot himself in the communal flat in which he had lived, near the Lubianka building in Moscow, when the Briks would not have him. Suicide was a constant theme in Mayakovsky’s poetry. The poem he wrote for his suicide note quotes (with minor alterations) from an untitled and unfinished poem written probably in the summer of 1929:

    As they say,

    a bungled story. Love’s boat

    smashed

    against existence. And we are quits with life.

    So why should we idly reproach each other

    with pain and insults? To those who remain - I wish happiness.
⁸⁴

    The Briks explained his suicide as the ‘unavoidable outcome of Mayakovsky’s hyperbolic attitude to life’.
⁸⁵
His transcendental hopes and expectations had crashed against the realities of life. Recent evidence has led to claims that Mayakovsky did not kill himself. Lily Brik, it has been revealed, was an agent of the NKVD, Stalin’s political police, and informed it of the poet’s private views. In his communal flat there was a concealed entrance through which someone could have entered Mayakovsky’s room, shot the poet and escaped unnoticed by neighbours. Notes discovered in the archives of his close friend Eisenstein reveal that Mayakovsky lived in fear of arrest. ‘He had to be removed - so they got rid of him,’ concluded Eisenstein.
⁸⁶

    Suicide or murder, the significance of the poet’s death was clear: there was no longer room in Soviet literature for the individualist. Mayakovsky was too rooted in the pre-revolutionary age, and his tragedy was shared by all the avant-garde who, like him, threw in their lot with the new society. The last works of Mayakovsky had been viciously attacked by the Soviet authorities. The press condemned
The Bedbug
(1929), a dazzling satire on Soviet manners and the new bureaucracy, with a sparkling score by Shostakovich which added to the montage by having several bands play different types of music (from classical to foxtrot) on and off the stage.
⁸⁷
They said the play had failed to portray the Soviet future in heroic terms. ‘We are brought to the conclusion’, complained one reviewer, ‘that life under socialism will be very dull in 1979’ (it was, it turned out, an accurate portrayal of the Brezhnev years).
⁸⁸
His next play,
The Bath House,
which opened in Meyerhold’s theatre in Moscow just one month before the poet’s death, was an awful flop, and its hilarious critique of Soviet bureaucrats again roundly condemned in the press. But the final straw was Mayakovsky’s retrospective exhibition of his artwork, which he put on in Moscow in March 1930. The exhibition was consciously avoided by the artistic intelligentsia; the poet Olga Berggolts, who went to visit Mayakovsky there, recalls the sight of the ‘tall man with a sad and

    austere face, his arms folded behind him, as he paced the empty rooms’.
⁸⁹
At an evening devoted to the exhibition, Mayakovsky said that he could no longer achieve what he had set out do - ‘to laugh at things I consider wrong… and to bring the workers to great poetry, without hack writing or a deliberate lowering of standards’.
⁹⁰

    The activities of RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) made life impossible for non-proletarian writers and ‘fellow travellers’ like Mayakovsky, who disbanded LEF, the Left Front, and joined RAPP in a last desperate bid to save himself in the final few weeks of his life. Formed in 1928 as the literary wing of Stalin’s Five-year Plan for industry, RAPP saw itself as the militant vanguard of a cultural revolution against the old intelligentsia. ‘The one and only task of Soviet literature’, its journal declared in 1930, ‘is the depiction of the Five-year Plan and the class war.’
⁹¹
The Five-year Plan was intended as the start of a new revolution which would transform Russia into an advanced industrialized state and deliver power to the working class. A new wave of terror began against the so-called ‘bourgeois’ managers in industry (that is, those who had held their jobs since 1917), and this was followed by a similar assault on ‘bourgeois specialists’ in the professions and the arts. Supported by the state, RAPP attacked the ‘bourgeois enemies’ of Soviet literature which it claimed were hidden in the left-wing avant-garde. Just five days before his death, Mayakovsky was condemned at a RAPP meeting at which his critics demanded proof that he would still be read in twenty years.
⁹²

    By the beginning of the 1930s, any writer with an individual voice was deemed politically suspicious. The satirists who flourished in the relatively liberal climate of the 1920s were the first to come under attack. There was Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose moral satires on the empty verbiage of the Soviet bureaucracy and the cramped conditions of communal flats were suddenly considered anti-Soviet in the new political climate of the Five-year Plan, when writers were expected to be positive and the only acceptable subject for satire were the foreign enemies of the Soviet Union. Then there was Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Gogolian satires about censorship (
The Crimson Island),
daily life in Moscow in the NEP
(Adventures of Chichikov),
Soviet xenophobia (
Fatal Eggs)
and his brilliant comic novel
The Heart of a Dog
(where a Pavlov like experimental scientist transplants the brain and sexual

    organs of a dog into a human being) were not only banned from publication but forbidden to be read when passed as manuscripts from hand to hand. Finally, there was Andrei Platonov, an engineer and Utopian communist (until he was expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1926) whose own growing doubts about the human costs of the Soviet experiment were reflected in a series of extraordinary dystopian satires:
The Epifan Locks
(19Z7), a timely allegory on the grandiose but ultimately disastrous canal-building projects of Peter the Great;
Chev-engur
(also 1927), a fatal odyssey in search of the true communist society; and
The Foundation Pit
(1930), a nightmare vision of collectivization in which the foundation pit of a huge communal home for the local proletariat turns out to be a monumental grave for humanity. All three were condemned as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and banned from publication for over sixty years.

    RAPP’s ‘class war’ reached fever pitch, however, in 1929 with its organized campaign of vilification against Zamyatin and Pilnyak. Both writers had published works abroad which had been censored in the Soviet Union: Zamyatin’s
We
appeared in Prague in 1927; and Pilnyak’s
Red Mahogany,
a bitter commentary on the decline of the revolutionary ideals of the Soviet state, was published in Berlin in 1929. But the attack on them had a significance beyond the condemnation of particular works. Boris Pilnyak, who was chairman of the Board of the All-Russian Writers’ Union and so effectively the Soviet Union’s Writer Number One, was perhaps the widest read and most widely imitated serious prose writer in the country.* His persecution was an advance warning of the strict obedience and conformity which the Soviet state would demand of all its writers from the start of the first Five-year Plan.

    For the Five-year Plan was not just a programme of industrialization. It was nothing less than a cultural revolution in which all the arts were called up by the state in a campaign to build a new society. According to the plan, the primary goal of the Soviet writer was to raise the workers’ consciousness, to enlist them in the ‘battle’ for ‘socialist construction’ by writing books with a social content which they could

    * Pilnyak’s best-known novels are
The Naked Year
(192.1),
Black Bread
(1923) and
Machines and Wolves
(1924).

    understand and relate to as positive ideals. For the militants of RAPP this could only be achieved by writers like Gorky, with his impeccably proletarian background, not by left-wing ‘bourgeois’ writers who were deemed no more than ‘fellow travellers’. Between 1928 and 1931 some 10,000 ‘shock authors’, literary confreres of the ‘shock workers’ who would lead the charge to meet the Plan, were plucked from the shop-floor and trained by RAPP to write workers’ stories for the Soviet press.
⁹³

    Gorky was hailed as the model for this Soviet literature. In 1921, horrified by the Revolution’s turn to violence and dictatorship, Gorky fled to Europe. But he could not bear the life of an exile: he was disillusioned by the rise of fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy; and he convinced himself that life in Stalin’s Russia would become more bearable once the Five-year Plan had swept aside the peasant backwardness which in his view had been the cause of the Revolution’s failure. From 1928 Gorky began to spend his summers in the Soviet Union and in 1931 Gorky returned home for good. The prodigal son was showered with honours: streets, buildings, farms and schools were named after him; a trilogy of films was made about his life; the Moscow Arts Theatre was renamed the Gorky Theatre; and his native city (Nizhnyi Novgorod) was renamed after him. He was also appointed head of the Writers’ Union, the post previously held by Pilnyak.

    Gorky had initially supported the RAPP campaign of promoting worker authors as a temporary experiment, but he quickly realized that the quality of the writing was not good. In April 1932 the Central Committee passed a resolution to abolish RAPP, together with all other independent literary groups, and placed them under the centralized control of the Writers’ Union. Gorky’s influence was instrumental in this sudden change of direction, but things did not quite turn out as he had planned. Gorky’s intention had been two-fold: to halt the destructive ‘class war’ led by RAPP; and to restore to Soviet literature the aesthetic principles established by Tolstoy. In October 1932, a famous meeting attended by Stalin and other Kremlin leaders, as well as fifty writers and other functionaries, took place at Gorky’s Moscow house. It was at this meeting that the doctrine of Socialist Realism was formulated, although at the time it was not clear to Gorky that it would become a regimented orthodoxy for all artists in the

    Soviet Union. Gorky’s understanding was that Socialist Realism would unite the critical realist traditions of nineteenth-century literature with the revolutionary romanticism of the Bolshevik tradition. It was to combine the depiction of the humble everyday reality of life in the Soviet Union with a vision of the Revolution’s heroic promise. But in Stalin’s version of the doctrine, as defined at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, it meant that the artist was to portray Soviet life, not as it was in reality, but as it should become:

    Socialist Realism means not only knowing reality as it is, but knowing where it is moving. It is moving towards socialism, it is moving towards the victory of the international proletariat. And a work of art created by a Socialist Realist is one which shows where that conflict of contradictions is leading which the artist has seen in life and reflected in his work.
⁹⁴

    In this formula the artist was to produce a panegyric or iconic form of art which conformed strictly to the Party’s narrative of socialist development.
⁹⁵
Whereas the
kinoki
and other avant-garde artists of the 1920s had sought to expand their audience’s vision of freedom and possibility, now artists were to fix that vision in ways strictly prescribed by the state. The new Soviet writer was no longer the creator of original works of art, but a chronicler of tales which were already contained in the Party’s own folklore.
⁹⁶
There was a sort of ‘master plot’ which Soviet writers were to use in shaping their own novels and characters. In its classic form, as set out in Gorky’s early novel
Mother
(1906), the plot was a Bolshevik version of the
Bildungsroman:
the young worker hero joins the class struggle and through the tutelage of senior Party comrades he arrives at a higher consciousness, a better understanding of the world around him and the tasks ahead for the Revolution, before dying a martyr to the cause. Later novels added elements to this master plot: Dmitry Furmanov’s
Chapaev
(1923) fixed the model of the civil war hero; while Fedor Gladkov’s
Cement
(1925) and Ostrovsky’s
How the Steel Was Tempered
raised the communist production worker to Promethean status, capable of conquering everything before him, even the most untamed forces of the natural world, as long as he allows the Party to direct his energies. But basically the story that the novelist could tell was strictly circumscribed by the