‘On the margin of what man can do,’ wrote Max Raphael, ‘there appears that which he cannot or cannot yet do — but which lies at the root of all creativeness.’ A revolutionary scientific history of art has to come to terms with such creativeness.
1978
Mayakovsky: His Language
and His Death [with Anya Bostock]
Jackals used to creep right up to the house. They moved in large packs and howled terribly. Their howling was most unpleasant and frightening. It was there that I first heard those wild piercing howls. The children could not sleep at night and I used to reassure them, ‘Don’t be afraid, we have good dogs, they won’t let them come near.’
Thus Mayakovsky’s mother described the forest in Georgia, Russia, where Vladimir and his sisters were brought up. The description is a reminder at the start that the world into which Mayakovsky was born was very different from our own.
When a man in good health commits suicide it is, finally, because there is no one who understands him. After his death the incomprehension often continues because the living insist on interpreting and using his story to suit their own purposes. In this way the ultimate protest against incomprehension goes unheard after all.
If we wish to understand the meaning of Mayakovsky’s example — and it is an example central to any thinking about the relation between revolutionary politics and poetry — we have to work on that meaning. A meaning embodied both in his poetry and in the destiny of his life, and death.
Let us begin simply. Outside Russia, Mayakovsky is known as a romantic political legend rather than as a poet. This is because his poetry has so far proved very hard to translate. This difficulty has encouraged readers to return to the old half-truth that great poetry is untranslatable. And so the story of Mayakovsky’s life — his avant-garde Futurist youth, his commitment to the Revolution in 1917, his complete self-identification as poet with the Soviet state, his role during ten years as poetic orator and proselytizer, his apparently sudden despair and suicide at the age of 36 — all this becomes abstract because the stuff of his poetry, which, in Mayakovsky’s case, was the stuff of his life, is missing. Everything began for Mayakovsky with the language he used, and we need to appreciate this even if we cannot read Russian. Mayakovsky’s story and tragedy concern the special historical relation which existed between him and the Russian language. To say this is not to depoliticize his example but to recognize its specificity.
Three factors about the Russian language.
1. During the nineteenth century the distinction between spoken and written Russian was far less marked than in any Western European country. Although the majority were illiterate, the written Russian language had not yet been expropriated and transformed to express the exclusive interests and tastes of the ruling class. But by the end of the century a differentiation between the language of the people and the new urban middle class was beginning to become apparent. Mayakovsky was opposed to this ‘emasculation of the language’. Nevertheless it was still possible and even natural for a Russian poet to believe that he could be the inheritor of a living popular language. It was not mere personal arrogance which made Mayakovsky believe that he could speak with the voice of Russia, and when he compared himself with Pushkin it was not to bracket two isolated geniuses but two poets of a language which might still belong to an entire nation.
2. Because Russian is an inflected and highly accented language, it is especially rich in rhymes and especially rhythmical. This helps to explain why Russian poetry is so widely known by heart. Russian poetry when read out loud, and particularly Mayakovsky’s, is nearer to rock than to Milton. Listen to Mayakovsky himself:
Where this basic dull roar of a rhythm comes from is a mystery. In my case it’s all kinds of repetitions in my mind of noises, rocking motions, or in fact of any phenomenon with which I can associate a sound. The sound of the sea, endlessly repeated, can provide my rhythm, or a servant who slams the door every morning, recurring and intertwining with itself, trailing through my consciousness; or even the rotation of the earth, which in my case, as in a shop full of visual aids, gives way to, and inextricably connects with the whistle of a high wind.1
These rhythmic and mnemonic qualities of Mayakovsky’s Russian are not, however, at the expense of content. The rhythmic sounds combine whilst their sense separates with extraordinary precision. The regularity of the sound reassures whilst the sharp, unexpected sense shocks. Russian is also a language which lends itself easily, through the addition of prefixes and suffixes, to the invention of new words whose meaning is nevertheless quite clear. All this offers opportunities to the poet as virtuoso: the poet as musician, or the poet as acrobat or juggler. A trapeze artist can bring tears to the eyes more directly than a tragedian.
3. After the Revolution, as a result of the extensive government literacy campaign, every Soviet writer was more or less aware that a vast new reading public was being created. Industrialization was to enlarge the proletariat and the new proletarians would be ‘virgin’ readers, in the sense that they had not previously been corrupted by purely commercial reading matter. It was possible to think, without unnecessary rhetoric, of the revolutionary class claiming and using the written word as a revolutionary right. Thus the advent of a literate proletariat might enrich and extend written language in the USSR instead of impoverishing it as had happened under capitalism in the West. For Mayakovsky after 1917 this was a fundamental article of faith. Consequently he could believe that the formal innovations of his poetry were a form of political action. When he worked inventing slogans for the government’s propaganda agency, ROSTA, when he toured the Soviet Union giving unprecedented public poetry readings to large audiences of workers, he believed that by way of his words he would actually introduce new turns of phrase, and thus new concepts, into the workers’ language. These public readings (although as the years went by he found them more and more exhausting) were probably among the few occasions when life really appeared to confirm the justice of his own self-appointed role. His words were understood by his audiences. Perhaps the underlying sense sometimes escaped them, but there in the context of his reading and their listening this did not seem to matter as it seemed to matter in the interminable arguments he was forced to have with editors and literary officials: there the audience, or a large part of it, seemed to sense that his originality belonged to the originality of the Revolution itself. Most Russians read poetry like a litany; Mayakovsky read like a sailor shouting through a megaphone to another ship in a heavy sea.
Thus the Russian language at that moment in history. If we call it a language demanding poetry it is not an exaggerated figure of speech, but an attempt to synthesize in a few words a precise historical situation. But what of the other term of the relation, Mayakovsky the poet? What kind of poet was he? He remains too original to be easily defined by comparison with other poets, but perhaps, however crudely, we can begin to define him as a poet by examining his own view of poetry, always remembering that such a definition is made without the pressures to which he was subject throughout his life: pressures in which subjective and historical elements were inseparable.
This is how, in his autobiographical notes, he describes becoming a poet:
Today I wrote a poem. Or to be exact: fragments of one. Not good. Unprintable. ‘Night’. Stretensky Boulevard. I read the poem to Burlyuk. I added: written by a friend. David stopped and looked at me. ‘You wrote it yourself!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re a genius!’ I was happy at this marvellous and undeserved praise. And so I steeped myself in poetry. That evening, quite unexpectedly, I became a poet.
The tone is laconic. Nevertheless he is saying that he became a poet because he was called upon to become one. Obviously the potential of his genius already existed. And would probably have been released in any case. But his temperament insisted that the release should come through a demand.
Later, he continually refers to poetry as something which must meet ‘a social command’. The poem is a dir
ect response to that command. One of the things which his early, marvellously flamboyant Futurist poetry has in common with his later political poetry is its form of address. By which we mean the poet’s stance towards the you being addressed. The you may be a woman, God, a party official, but the way of presenting the poet’s life to the power being addressed remains similar. The you is not to be found in the life of the I. Poetry is the making of poetic sense of the poet’s life for the use of another. One might say that this is more or less true of all poetry. But in Mayakovsky’s case the notion that poetry is a kind of exchange acting between the poet’s life and the demands of other lives is specially developed. In this idea is implanted the principle that the poetry will be justified or not by its reception. And here we touch upon one of the important conflicts in Mayakovsky’s life as a poet. Its starting point is the existence of language as the primary fact; its finishing point is the judgement of others towards his use of that language in a set of particular circumstances. He took language upon himself as though it were his own body, but he depended upon others to decide whether or not that body had the right to exist.
One of Mayakovsky’s favourite comparisons is between the production of poetry and industrial factory production. To explain this metaphor just in terms of a Futurist admiration for modern technology would be to miss the point. Poetry for Mayakovsky was a question of processing or transforming experience. He speaks of the poet’s experience as the raw material for poetry, the finished product being the poem which will answer the social command.
Only the presence of rigorously thought-out preliminary work gives me the time to finish anything, since my normal output of work in progress is eight to ten lines a day.
A poet regards every meeting, every signpost, every event in whatever circumstances simply as material to be shaped into words.
What he means there by preliminary work is the inventing and storing of rhymes, images, lines which will later be useful. The ‘manufacture’ of the poem, as he explains with unique frankness in How Are Verses Made?, goes through several stages. First there is the preliminary work: the casting into words of experience and the storing of these relatively short word-units.
In about 1913, when I was returning from Saratov to Moscow, so as to prove my devotion to a certain female companion, I told her that I was ‘not a man, but a cloud in trousers’. When I’d said it, I immediately thought it could be used in a poem … Two years later I needed ‘a cloud in trousers’ for the title of a whole long poem.
Then comes the realization that there is ‘a social command’ for a poem on a particular theme. The need behind the command must be fully understood by the poet. Finally comes the composition of the poem in accordance with the need. Some of what has been cast into words can now be used to its ideal maximum. But this requires trial and retrial. When it is at last right, it acquires explosive power.
Comrade tax inspector,
on my honour,
A rhyme
costs the poet
a sou or two.
If you’ll allow the metaphor,
a rhyme is
a barrel.
A barrel of dynamite.
The line is the fuse.
When the fuse burns up
the barrel explodes.
And the city blows into the air:
that’s the stanza.
What is the price tariff
for rhymes
Which aim straight
and kill outright?
It could be that
only five undiscovered rhymes
are left
In all the world
and those perhaps in Venezuela.
The trail leads me
into cold and hot climates.
I plunge,
entangled in advances and loans.
Citizen,
make allowance for the cost of the
fare!
Poetry — all of it! —
is a voyage into the unknown.
Poetry
is like mining for radium.
The output an ounce
the labour a year.
For the sake of a single word
you must process
Thousands of tons
of verbal ore.
Compare the flash-to-ashes
of such a word
With the slow combustion
of the ones left in their natural
state!
Such a word
sets in motion
Thousands of years
and the hearts of millions.2
When the poem is written, it needs to be read. By readers themselves, but also by the poet out loud. At his public readings Mayakovsky was a man showing what the things he had made could do: he was like a driver or test pilot — except that his performance with the poems took place, not on the ground or in the air, but in the minds of his listeners.
We should not, however, be deceived, by Mayakovsky’s desire to rationalize the making of verses, into believing that there was no mystery in the process for him. His poetic vision was passionate, and continually rocked by his own astonishment.
The universe sleeps
And its gigantic ear
Full of ticks
That are stars
Is now laid on its paw.
Yet he saw poetry as an act of exchange, an act of translation whose purpose was to make the poet’s experience usable by others. He believed in an alchemy of language; in the act of writing the miraculous transformation occurred. When he wrote about Yessenin’s suicide in 1925 he was unable to give any convincing reason why Yessenin should have gone on living — although he judged that this was what the social command required. It is early in the poem that he makes his real point: if only there had been ink in the hotel bedroom where Yessenin cut his wrists and hanged himself, if only he had been able to write, he could have gone on living. To write was simultaneously to come into one’s own and to join others.
In the same poem Mayakovsky speaks of the Russian people ‘in whom our language lives and breathes’, and he castigates all timid, academic usage of this language. (Yessenin, he says, would have told the conformist orators at his funeral to stuff their funeral orations up their arse.) He admits that it is a difficult time for writers. But what time hasn’t been? he asks. And then he writes:
Words are
the commanders
of mankind’s forces.
March!
and behind us
time
explodes like a landmine.
To the past
we offer
only the streaming tresses
Of our hair
tangled
by the wind.3
To clarify what we are saying, it may be helpful to compare Mayakovsky with another writer. Yannis Ritsos, the contemporary Greek poet, is like Mayakovsky an essentially political poet: he is also a Communist. Yet despite their common political commitment, Ritsos is precisely the opposite kind of poet to Mayakovsky. It is not from the act of writing or processing words that Ritsos’s poetry is born. His poetry appears as the consequence of a fundamental decision which in itself has nothing to do with poetry. Far from being the finished product of a complicated production process, Ritsos’s poetry seems like a by-product. One has the impression that his poems exist for him before their accumulation of words: they are the precipitate of an attitude, a decision already taken. It is not by his poems that he proves his political solidarity, but the other way round: on account of his political attitude, certain events offer their poetic face.
Saturday 11 a.m.
The women gather the clothes from
the clothes line.
The landlady stands in the doorway
of the yard.
One holds a suitcase.
The other has a black hat on.
The dead pay no rent.
They have disconnected Helen’s
telephone.
The doughnut man
shouts on
purpose: ‘Doughnuts,
warm doughnuts.’ The young
violinist at the window —
‘warm zero-round doughnuts,’
he says.
He throws his violin down on the
sidewalk.
The parrot looks over the baker’s
shoulder.
The landlady tinkles her keys.
The three women go in, shut the
door.4
There can be no question of quoting Ritsos against Mayakovsky, or vice versa. They are different kinds of poets writing in different circumstances. Ritsos’s choice, of which his poetry (given his poetic genius) is the by-product, is a choice of opposition and resistance. Mayakovsky considered that it was his political duty to celebrate and affirm. One form of poetry is public, the other clandestine. Contrary, however, to what one may expect, the former may be the more solitary.
To return now to Mayakovsky. Before the Revolution and during its first years, one can say that the Russian language was demanding poetry on a mass scale; it was seeking its own national poets. It is impossible to know whether Mayakovsky’s genius was actually formed by this demand or only developed by it. But the coincidence between his genius and the state of the language at that moment is crucial to his life’s work, and perhaps to his death. It was a coincidence which lasted only for a certain time.
From the period of NEP onwards, the language of the Revolution began to change. At first the change must have been almost imperceptible — except to a poet-performer like Mayakovsky. Gradually words were ceasing to mean exactly what they said. (Lenin’s will-to-truthfulness was exceptional and his death, in this respect as in others, now appears as a turning point.) Words began to hide as much as they signified. They became double-faced: one face referring to theory, the other to practice. For example the word Soviet became a designation of citizenship and a source of patriotic pride: only in theory did it still refer to a particular form of proletarian democracy. The ‘virgin’ reading public became, to a large degree, a reading public that was deceived.