Book review: The murder of Mayakovsky's poetry
Mayakovsky: A Biography
by Bengt Jangfeldt
reviewed by Emily Hill
I had always thought’, said Pasternak, ‘that Mayakovsky’s
innate talent would explode one day, that it would be forced to blow up these
storehouses of chemically pure nonsense, dreamlike in its meaninglessness,
which he has voluntarily decked himself out in until he became unrecognisable.’
Or, as Marina Tsvetaeva put it, so succinctly: ‘For 12 years in a row
Mayakovsky the human being tried to kill Mayakovsky the poet within himself; in
the thirteenth year the poet stood up and killed the human being.’
Mayakovsky’s ‘storehouses of chemically pure nonsense’ were
forcefed to hundreds of millions across the USSR while his real achievement,
his personal lyrics, was written out of history. Then, when the Soviet Union
fell, Mayakovsky’s reputation collapsed with it. Today, he is not celebrated as
the author of some of the most startlingly original verse in the Russian
language, but as a versifier of totalitarianism.
Biographers are amateur private detectives’, Roman Jakobson
once wrote. If so, there are few juicier cases than Vladimir Mayakovsky. For
even his death presents a double murder: the suicide of the man and the
annihilation of his poetry. The crime scene remains intact – preserved for us
by Pasternak. The corpse lies, alone in a room, with a bullet through the
heart. The murder weapon – a Mauser pistol – was provided by an agent of
Stalin’s secret police. The suicide note is a startling poem – with a new pun….
Cause of death? Frustrated poetry.
…Mayakovsky was a complex character. An ambidextrous
cardsharp, who took losing as a personal insult; a proletarian agitator, who
dressed like a dandy; a germ-fearing hypochondriac, smoking 100 cigarettes a
day; a lady-killer with rotten teeth, causing a string of abortions wherever he
went. He transformed perfectly successful romances into desperate and
blistering love lyrics. Massive and overbearing, at six foot three, always
beating out the rhythm of his verse with his steel toe caps and a cane, he made
constant jokes, but rarely laughed at them. He had a shaven head, the demeanour
of a ‘hooligan’, and when deprived of an audience he turned out to be neurotic
and very gentle. Even his name, from the Russian word for ‘Lighthouse’, sounded
like he’d made it up. His living arrangements were also unorthodox. From around
1915, until shortly before his death, he lived in a complicated ménage a trois,
with his muse, Lilya, and her husband, the critic Osip Brik.
The sheer, shocking inventiveness of Mayakovsky’s poems is
nigh impossible to translate. ‘I always put the most characteristic word at the
end of a line and find for it a rhyme at any cost’, Mayakovsky explained in his
essay ‘How To Make Verse’. ‘As a result, my rhymes are almost always out of the
ordinary and, in any case, have not been used before me and do not exist in
rhyming dictionaries.’
His poems fizz with ‘grammatical deformations, bizarre
inversions, neologisms and puns’. According to one Russian critic, the English
equivalent of a conservative Mayakovskian rhyme would be Browning’s
‘ranunculus’ with ‘Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us’. What does come across in
English, however, is the brilliance and brutality of his metaphors. ‘My poems’,
he explains, ‘Jump out / like mad gladiators / ‘Kill!’ / they cry.’ In one, he
invites the sun to have tea with him; in another, he inserts it, like a
monocle, in his gaping eye. He orders firemen to climb into his heart, to put
out an inferno. He complains he was ‘sired by Goliaths - / I, so large, so unwanted’,
but says he is so tender, as a lover, that he is not a man ‘but a cloud in
trousers’.
Before the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky anticipated it.
When it dawned, he was determined to lay his talent at its service – creating
posters and advertising jingles for ROSTA, the state news agency. For a decade,
Mayakovsky claimed, ‘The working class / speaks / through my mouth. / And we, /
proletarians, / are drivers of the pen.’ He appalled Lenin with his panegyric
poem ‘150,000,000’ (‘stupid, stupid beyond belief… should be horsewhipped for
Futurism’) but amused him with his satirical take on Soviet bureaucracy (‘in
his poem he ridicules all conferences and pokes fun at Communists who simply
attend one conference after another. I can’t comment on the poetry, but as far
as the politics are concerned, I can guarantee that he is absolutely correct.’)
In the early years of the Soviet regime, Mayakovsky enjoyed
artistic freedom, his praise of the Bolshevik vision entirely self-imposed. He
was able to churn out poems in praise of the Soviet state, but also
astonishing, free-flowing lyrics, such as ‘I Love’ and ‘About This’. But, from
1926 onwards, when Stalin began his inexorable rise, Mayakovsky felt under
pressure to write politically pure verse. His attempts, such as ‘The Saboteur’
– about the Shakhty trial – and ‘The Story of the Smelter Ivan Kozyrov about
How He Moved into a New Apartment’ verge on the abysmal. ‘During one of our
meetings, Mayakovsky, as was his custom, read me his latest poems’, wrote Roman
Jakobson. ‘Considering his creative potential I could not help comparing them
with what he might have produced. “Very good”, I said, “but not as good as
Mayakovsky”.’
Privately, Mayakovsky worried that he was ‘finished’ as a
poet: ‘As the years go by, / you wear out / the machine of the soul. /And
people say: / “A back number, / he’s written out, / he’s through! / There’s
less and less love, / and less and less daring, / and time is a battering ram /
against my head. / Then there’s amortization, / the deadliest of all; /
amortization / of the heart and soul.’
He travelled extensively, to Germany, France, Mexico and
America, meeting Picasso, Cocteau and attending Proust’s funeral. While in New
York, he fathered an illegitimate child. On his return, he turned his
attentions to the stage, writing his greatest satire, The Bedbug.
That same year, 1928, his poetry began to gush forth once more – in the most
inconvenient manner possible. Women had always been crucial to Mayakovsky’s
lyricism, and when he met Tatyana Yakovleva, a leggy White Russian émigré in
her early twenties, with a ‘perfect pitch’ for poetry, her impact was
immediate. In ‘Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love’,
which he knew would drop ‘a bomb’ on his audience back home, Mayakovsky
described how, ‘Love has inflicted / on me / a lasting wound – I can barely
move… / love / tells us, humming / that the stalled motor / of the heart / has
started to work / again.’
Back in Moscow, Lilya Brik — the woman to whom Mayakovsky
had dedicated his poems for more than a decade — was not best pleased at being
replaced as the great man’s muse. And neither were her close friends in the
security services impressed that their ‘iron poet’ was, all of a sudden,
writing violent, all-consuming love poems to a bourgeois beauty, ‘all inset in
furs / and beads’. As early as 1920, the Briks were known as informants, when
an anonymous note was pinned to their door: ‘You think that Brik lives here,
the noted linguist? / Here lives an interrogator and a Chekist.’ In the late
1920s, the Briks were able to acquire exit visas for foreign travel at a time they
were denied to nearly every other citizen in the Soviet Union. Including
Mayakovsky, who, in 1929, was refused permission to return to Paris, where he
had hoped to marry Tatyana.
It is at this point that Jangfeldt’s book becomes both
horrifying and utterly compulsive, as it plunges headlong into the poet’s final
days. It is as if Lilya Brik, the Soviet Writers’ Union (RAPP) and Stalin’s
secret police (the OGPU) all compete, to see who can polish a bullet fastest,
for Mayakovsky’s gun. First, Jangfeldt implies, the OGPU stuffed Mayakovsky’s
poetry readings full of detractors, to ask him questions such as: ‘Mayakovksy,
we know from history that good poets tend to come to a bad end. Either they’re
murdered or… When were you thinking of shooting yourself?’ Then RAPP ensures
that a retrospective of 20 years of Mayakovsky’s work is a dismal, barely
attended failure... read more:
