Fatal Futurist: The Suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky
Arguably one of the most talented and controversial poets in Russia’s history,
Vladimir Mayakovsky gave birth to a literary style all his own, rising to prominence under the newly formed Soviet regime. Rushing to meet the revolution with zealous determination he found himself increasingly marginalized in the Soviet literary scene as a
“fellow traveler”, only to be posthumously declared “the best and the most talented poet” of the Soviet epoch by none other than Stalin. Mayakovsky’s suicide has fascinated scholars for decades and the reasons for it are still debated today; initially some people speculated he had been playing Russian roulette, others suspected foul play. In this paper
I investigate the possible motives behind Mayakovsky’s suicide, arguing that it was the failure of the revolution that drove him to kill himself. This investigation requires a brief analysis of his literary evolution to understand how Vladimir Mayakovsky rose to the heights of Soviet literary culture by breaking from ‘bourgeois’ tradition. For perspective, special attention will be paid to the societal and anthropological conventions of suicide.
In the final part of this paper I will discuss how Mayakovsky’s legacy was appropriated by the Stalinist regime in order to create a symbol of Soviet cultural pride, resulting in a denial and misinterpretation of his works- Mayakovsky’s second death.
Early Life
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born on July 7, 1893 in Baghdadi,
Georgia (later renamed Mayakovsky in his honor). His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich was in the government service. Mayakovsky remained close to his mother, Aleksandra
Alekseevna, throughout his life, in no doubt due to his father’s premature death from blood poisoning in 1906. In addition to the young Volodya, there were two older sisters,
Olga and Lyudmila. Volodya matured quickly, both physically and mentally, and his
1 imposing frame and domineering appearance defined his appearance through childhood and adult life. At age six he taught himself to read, though in his early years his writing and math skills were not very good. A disinterested and unmotivated student in secondary school his grades were consistently poor.
In the ferment of the Russo-Japanese War (having begun in January 1904) and the
Revolution of 1905, Mayakovsky’s sister, Lyudmila, a student in Moscow, brought back political books and pamphlets. Exposed to revolutionary tracts at a young age, Volodya, now in the third grade, developed a love for mass meetings, demonstrations, and agitation amongst the workers.
The family was plunged into poverty following the death of Mayakovsky’s father in 1906. With a lack of opportunities in the countryside, the family moved to Moscow in search of greater wealth. Mayakovsky’s childhood experience in Georgia seems to have left little indentation on his person. Though he spoke Georgian fluently, he never seems to have been concerned with Georgian poetry. The natural beauty of the Georgian countryside did not resonant with young Volodya; it would remain for the urban cityscape to capture Mayakovsky’s imagination.
To make some extra money his mother took in tenants. Many of these tenants were radical students- socialists who introduced the overgrown Mayakovsky to Marxism.
His personal exposure to radical politics took an active interest in secondary school.
During this tumultuous period, it wasn’t unusual for maturing students to join clandestine political groups in touch with the revolutionary underground. A revolutionary before he became a poet, in 1908 Mayakovsky joined the Russian Social-Democratic party and before long he was elected to its Moscow committee. Victor Terras notes the young
2 Volodya’s rapid advancement in the party structure, for “local party membership in 1908 numbered in the dozens, and not in the hundreds or thousands.”1
On March 29, 1908 Mayakovsky was arrested for the first of his eventual three times. The police had arrived at a party cell of the Social Democratic party to seize an illegal printing press when Mayakovsky walked into the occurring arrest, carrying a stack of revolutionary tracts. His second arrest was on January 21, 1909 for suspected involvement with several members of the Socialist Revolutionary party. These individuals had been captured and found guilty for committing bank robberies throughout
Moscow in order to fill the party’s coffers. Having had no part in these “expropriations” had with his innocence secured, Mayakovsky was released on February 27th.
His third arrest held graver consequences. On July 1, 1909 Mayakovsky arrived at the apartment of the wife of I. I. Morchadze, a Georgian revolutionary. The day prior
Morchadze had masterminded a jailbreak of political prisoners from the Moscow Prison for Women. Though he denied have any connection with the jailbreak or Morchadze’s trail of bank robberies, the young Mayakovsky was thrown in jail. He did not go willingly. His warden’s report, dated August 1909, reads: “Vladimir Vladimirovich
Mayakovsky…incites other prisoners to disobedience…purporting to be the prisoners’
‘spokesman’…”2 It seems that after his initial transfer the rowdy behavior did not cease, for Mayakovsky was transferred at least three times in his six months of incarceration before ending up in solitary confinement.
Mayakovsky’s tour in prison marked a turning point in his early life. According to his own testimony, it was here that he wrote his first poetry. Doubting his ability to write
1 Victor Terras, Vladimir Mayakovsky (Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall & Company), 2. 2 Terras, 3.
3 poetry, Mayakovsky harnessed his painting ability and joined the studio of Petr Kelin.
Kelin would prepare Mayakovsky for the entrance exam to the Moscow School of
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he would eventually pass the exam, after an initial failure, in 1911. With a preoccupation with painting still holding sway,
Mayakovsky’s first exposure to modernism was through painting rather than prose. It was
David Burlyuk, Mayakovsky’s first fan and longtime friend, who was to introduce
Mayakovsky to modernist poetry. A gifted organizer and shrewd judge of talent, Burlyuk was principal amongst the originators of the Russian Futurist movement.
Mayakovsky later joined the Bolshevik party as a propagandist under the codename Comrade Constantin. After several arrests Mayakovsky was expelled from the
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture in 1914.
Russian Futurism & Early Works
Although the two groups shared the same title, the Russian Futurists were politically at odds with the authoritarian, militarist views of the spokesman of the Italian movement Filippo Marinetti. The Russian Futurists outlined their views in a literary manifesto published in 1912, in which they expressed their intention to free art from the suffocating conventions and taboos of society, attempting to discard all the culture of the past and replacing it with their own revolutionary art form. “A Slap in the Face of Public
Taste,” advocated for “throwing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy overboard from the steamship of modernity.”3 Such nonconformity extended beyond the artistic realm into everyday life. The Futurists were known for their startling dress and use of masks, and
Mayakovsky is fondly remembered as draped in a bright-yellow, garish shirt.
3 Janko Lavrin, From Pushkin to Mayakovsky: A Study in the Evolution of a Literature (London: Sylvan Press Ltd.) 282.
4 The Futurists saw themselves as the cultural counterpart to the political revolution. Futurism took art, literally, onto the street. The Futurists were unique amongst the avant-garde for their radical nihilism in relation to the cultural achievements of their forbearers repudiating all traditions, all authorities, and all established standards prevalent in society and culture. It was the ferocity with which Mayakovsky cast off the old world in favor of the new, a world in which he intended to as chief architect, that drew him into natural inclusion with the Russian Futurists.
In “Man” (1916) Mayakovsky’s “rival and foe” is not the entrenched autocracy or world capitalism but philistinism. Mayakovsky summarized the creative destruction ideal that distinguished the Futurists from other avant-garde movements of the period when he said, “To destroy is to create, for in destroying we overcome our past.”4 Victor Erlich captures the total war of cultural iconoclasm as an precondition for unleashing the artists’ potential: “What is challenged here is not a definite social order but the very principle of order or stasis, everything that smacks of tradition, of habit, of routine, everything that sets limits to the Creator’s disheveled, colossal sensibility.”5 The Futurists, in the historic mission of the intelligentsia to serve the people, seemed unconcerned or unaware that their geometric cubist art, irregular syntax, and crafting of a new lexicology could possibly be incomprehensible to the largely semi-literate public.
A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which contained the literary manifesto of the same name, was also notable for containing Mayakovsky’s first published poems—
“Night” and “Morning”. In terms of form, his poetry was an unseen aberration in Russian
4 Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press) 124. 5 Victor Erlich, “The Dead Hand of the Future: The Predicament of Vladimir Mayakovsky “Slavic Review 21 (1962): 434.
5 literature. Vyacheslav Zavalishin describes the originality of Mayakovsky’s rhythmics through his use of the metrical pause. These rhythms, with the borrowed vocabulary and imagery from church ritual, come close to those of Orthodox religious chants.6 A popular convention of his, Mayakovsky’s staggered verse patterns gives his pieces a sense of speed:
We were attacking
With shells and mortars,
The last
White troops
Were piling aboard.
Written during his most “Futurist” phase, Mayakovsky’s first poem of considerable size, “A Cloud in Trousers” (1915) combines his frustrated feelings of love with the anarchist sentiments of his revolutionary side channeling his anger at the world- order. Unrequited love was to be a main theme of Mayakovsky’s poetry throughout his pre-revolutionary period. Mayakovsky called “A Cloud in Trousers” a tetraptych, as it was written in four parts with four themes:7
1. “Down with Your Love”
2. “Down with Your Art”
3. “Down with Your Society”
6 Vyacheslav Zavalishin, Early Soviet Writers (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Inc.) 75. 7 Vladimir Mayakovsky and Herbert Marshall, Mayakovsky (London: Dennis Dobson) 98.
6 4. “Down with Your Religion”
The Russian Futurists sought to elevate the writer’s role in society, to put “the pen on a level with the bayonet.”8 Believing Communism would bring about the destruction of all hierarchies, including those existing in art, the majority of Futurists aligned themselves with Communism following the October Revolution in 1917. The uncritical enthusiasm with which the Futurists greeted the October Revolution, confounding their artistic revolution with the Bolshevik’s political one, was best captured by Mayakovsky himself when he reflected on the revolution: “To accept or not to accept? There was no such problem for me or other Moscow Futurists. My Revolution!”9 Within a month of the founding of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Mayakovsky was ready to give his all to the revolution, “to offer all my sonorous powers of a poet to you, the attacking class.”10
The duty of the poet and his role in revolution was to pervade much of
Mayakovsky’s later writing under the new regime. The poet and his editor, Osip Brik, saw no conflict between the artistic motivations of Russian Futurism and the political aims of the radical Marxist leaders. For them, art was not an imitation of reality—it was action. Art and politics were reconfigured as two branches of the same yearning desire for liberation from traditional society.
For the premiere Futurist poet, the equation was simple: with Futurism being the most advanced form of art and the proletariat the most advanced social class, then
Futurism must be proletarian art. The Futurists imbued the writer with an activist strand, expected to participate in the building of the new society more akin to the architect or
8 Mayakovsky and Marshall, 81. 9 Terras, 9. 10 Erlich, 435.
7 craftsman rather than the traditional image of the socially aloof artistic genius. Such rabid enthusiasm can be contrasted with the actions of most other Russian writers who hung back, unwilling to participate in the revolution, some even going so far as to emigrate to
Western Europe and the United States.
It all seemingly fell into place, but as Mayakovsky and the other members of the
Futurists and the literary avant-garde would soon learn, the Party held its own concerns for the form literature was to take under the dictatorship of the working class.
Mayakovsky felt that the Futurist call for a new vision of society could be adapted to the
Soviet vision. In fact, Futurism made impressive gains during the first ten years of the experimental period of Soviet rule from 1917-1927.
Mayakovsky’s new self-conception as the faithful mouthpiece of the Bolshevik state marked a shift in the content of his writings from earlier themes of love to a newfound preoccupation with current political happenings. The foremost representative of the Futurists, Mayakovsky’s allegiance had implications for the Futurists at large.
Having aligned itself with the state, the Futurist movement lost much of its apolitical rebelliousness. Now dyed in a shade of red, Futurism was expected to glorify and extol the virtues of the state.
During the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, Mayakovsky focused his creative energies in the visual medium with creating placards and posters for the Soviet telegraph agency (ROSTA). These colorful and expressive cartoons functioned as a source of information on current events and encouraged citizens to support the war effort.
Mayakovsky continued this concern for public good through much of the 1920’s, working tirelessly to spread revolutionary fervor through Soviet commercials, marches,
8 propaganda posters, political lampoons, plays, and movie scripts attacking opponents of the regime and glorifying Soviet institutions. Mayakovsky produced poems such as
“March of the Shock-Worker Brigades” (1930) and “March of the Twenty-Five
Thousand” (1930) praising the industrial initiatives imposed during this time.
Mayakovsky’s own conception of the poet as the handmaiden of the state extended beyond a personal belief into a call for all writers of the revolutionary period.
Mayakovsky’s harsh utilitarian conception of poetry bears an eerie resemblance to
Stalin’s later pronouncement of writers as “the engineers of the human soul.”11
Mayakovsky, with his pre-revolutionary experience in public performance, blossomed in this agitational role, developing an aggressive directness exhorting the public to action. Gazing through the tint cast by political orthodoxy, Mayakovsky saw poetry in terms of black and white, or rather red and white, with any poetry not immediately useful relegated to the trash bin of history: “In our days only he is a poet who will write a march and a slogan.”12
Vladimir Mayakovsky was as uncompromising with himself as he was with others. Curiously enough, Mayakovsky would go so far as to deny being a poet: “I am not a poet, but first of all a man who put his pen at the service- at the service, mind you- of the present moment, of today’s reality and its standard-bearer, the Soviet government and the Party.”13 And so with the self-aggrandizement derived from his new unofficial role as orator of Soviet power was paralleled a self-denigration, stripping poetry of its individualistic pretensions and supplanted by a puritanical civic agenda.
11 Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, 286. 12 Erlich, 437. 13 Erlich, 437.
9 For the reading public to remain receptive to his writing, Mayakovsky had to dump some of his futurist baggage, replacing it with more literal and straightforward language free of the supernatural hyperbole that defined his futurist writings. This transformation was eased by the gradual fading out of the literary establishment from which he had matured best signified by David Burlyuk’s emigration to the United States after the revolution.
Newly draped in a cloak of red, Futurism was no longer private and elitist or, for that matter, free from political interference. An exemplary member of the avant-garde par excellence, Mayakovsky was unique in the zealous determination he showed in his attempts to conform. In the decade following his eventual suicide other members of the intelligentsia would be terrorized into such conformity. The poet’s unparalleled willingness to serve and his harsh rebuke from Party authorities and eventual canonization is a historical curiosity in itself.
In spite of their enthusiasm the Bolsheviks remained suspicious of the Futurists.
Lenin, in particular, objected to Russian Futurism. In the heady early days of the revolution, Mayakovsky wrote 150, 000, 000. His first major work after the revolution,
150, 000, 000 marks the dissolution of Mayakovsky’s earlier egoism into the swirling masses. This process wasn’t merely aesthetic, the careful steps taken to conceal his authorship reveals how concerned Mayakovsky had come to consider his preeminent celebrity. Recalling the publication of 150, 000, 000, Mayakovsky revealed: “Published it
10 without my name. Wanted anyone who was so inclined to continue it and improve it.
Nobody did, but everyone knew who wrote it all the same.”14
The plot of 150, 000, 000, spread across seven parts, involves a giant Woodrow
Wilson holed up in Chicago, a city where everyone is designated by rank. The Soviet avatar Ivan, composed of 150, 000, 000 Soviet workers, walks dry-shod across the
Pacific to do battle with Wilson in hand-to-hand combat. After earth-shattering destruction, President Wilson is reduced to ashes and the new world, free of ranks and classes, begins. Ivan’s crossing of the Pacific is an obvious mockery of Jesus’ walking on the water of the Sea of Galilee. The message is blunt: the Son of God has been replaced by worker solidarity whose triumph over capitalism has produced a paradise on earth rivaling that of heaven.
A fusion of art and political propaganda, 150, 000, 000 was definitively avant- garde. The reactions were generally negative across the artistic and political spectrums.
Lenin, a conservative the arts, considered it to be absurd and pretentious referring to it as
“a special type of communism…hooligan communism!”15 Boris Pasternak saw 150, 000,
000 as a waste of talent for the purposes of crude propaganda.
Trotsky was more receptive to Mayakovsky than the other Bolshevik leaders. As early as 1923 he understood that although Futurism held different aims than the
Revolution, it could be adapted. On Mayakovsky and his contributions, Trotsky judged:
“For Mayakovsky the Revolution was a deep, a true experience…the dynamism of the
Revolution and its stern courage were closer to Mayakovsky than the mass character of
14 Roger Shattuck “The Poetics of Revolution” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 2 (1969): 70. 15 Michael Holquist “The Mayakovsky Problem” Yale French Studies 39 (1967): 128.
11 its heroism, deeds, and experiences….in the development of that art (new Soviet art),
Futurism will show itself to have been one of the necessary links. And is this so very little?”16 Michael Holquist summarizes the uniqueness of Trotsky’s position as representing a middle ground between the early ambiguity to Mayakovsky’s role in the
Revolution and the enshrinement Mayakovsky was to receive post-mortem as the voice of the Revolution.17
In the thrall of the civil war, the management of the arts were left to the relatively liberal Anatoly Lunacharsky, himself a playwright, who believed in creative freedom so as long as it served the Revolution. With the victory of the Reds over the Whites in 1921, the Bolsheviks sought to secure their rule through the enlargement of the bureaucratic establishment. Furthermore, by the mid-1920’s the party had committed itself to the creation of uniform proletarian culture. The party initially backed the poets of the proletarian culture movement, Proletkult, with its intention to form a bedrock for proletarian art free from bourgeois conventions. With much of their writings composed in a rather conventional manner, Mayakovsky saw Proletkult as artistically retrograde and the vociferous battle for the artistic helm of the revolution raged throughout the 1920’s amongst these and other rival groups.
The Communist ethic, with its emphasis on the masses and collective effort, was antithetical to the fierce individualism of Futurism. When the Bolshevik leaders recognized the Futurist program as potentially subversive in that it intended to free the writer from institutionalization and conformity, the Bolsheviks rejected the Futurists and favored the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) instead.
16 Holquist, 133. 17 Holquist, 134.
12 The concretization of the new monolithic direction of the party came with the
Party resolution on literature in 1925. Vahaan Barooshian describes the intention of this resolution as two-fold. In part, its aim was to pacify the literary disputes that had been raging throughout the twenties amongst the various literary groups purporting to have formulated a new proletarian literature and to free the Party from commitment to the program of any one literary group. The resolution reveals the frustration this artistic uncertainty was creating: “Everything compels the assumption that a style corresponding to the epoch will be created, but it will be created by different methods…any attempt to bind the Party in this direction…must be rejected.”18 On the other hand, the Party sought to direct the tide of literary development, proclaiming the future “hegemony of proletarian literature.”
The larger implication meant that the party would no longer tolerate a policy of
“free competition of various groups and tendencies”, imposing a “proletarian” ideology of its own instead.19 This marked the formal dissolution of the Futurists as a group and the end of their literary experimentation. The seeds of socialist realism had been planted.
Writing for the Regime
One of Mayakovsky’s best-known post-revolutionary poems was Vladimir Il’ich
Lenin (1924), written immediately after Lenin’s death. Here we see Mayakovsky’s blossoming enthusiasm for the promises of world revolution taken to absurd heights, with
Lenin’s portrayal as a godlike superman of the industrial age. Propagandistic, Vladimir
Il’ich Lenin was intended to reaffirm faith in the popular mind, which following the
18 Vahan Barooshian “Russian Futurism in the Late 1920’s: Literature of Fact” The Slavic and East European Journal 15 (1971): 38. 19 Barooshian, 38.
13 human toll wrought by agricultural collectivization, civil war, and Bolshevik repressions, had begun to falter.
Lenin’s
even now
most alive of all living.
Our knowledge,
power
and weapon. 20
At the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan in the late 1920’s Mayakovsky was still serving the regime, though he was increasingly deviating from the Party line. Unable to stomach the subservient role of the poet he had foisted on himself, Mayakovsky lashed out in his political satires attacking Communist bureaucrats, nepotism, and the new
Soviet bourgeoisie. With pieces such as “Manufacturing Bureaucrats” (1926), “The
Bootlicker” (1928) and “Manual for Beginners in Bootlicking” 1927, Mayakovsky’s initial enthusiasm had come to be replaced by cynical mockery. “To Mayakovsky,”
Zavalishin states, “the new ‘Red aristocracy’ had abolished hereditary monarchy but… had reasserted the idea of absolutism which the revolution had intended to destroy.”21
The first of his two most denunciatory and outspoken plays, The Bedbug: A
Fantastic Comedy in Nine Pictures (1928) is a play in two acts. In The Bedbug,
Mayakovsky attacks the opportunistic party apparatchiks who had infested the Soviet bureaucracy following the New Economic Policy implemented in 1921. In the first act,
20 Zavalishin, 78. 21 Zavashlian, 82.
14 Ivan Prisypkin, a proletarian previously purged from the party has decided to reap the fruits of the Revolution now. Filling the void left by the ousted bourgeoisie, Prisypkin, as a member of the new Red aristocracy abandons his proletarian girlfriend Zoya, who shoots herself, takes lessons in ballroom dancing and refined manners.
The second part takes place fifty years later, in 1979. Encased in ice, Prisypkin’s frozen body is discovered and sent to the Institute of Human Resurrection. Prisypkin and a bedbug, which has infested his body, are resurrected. The final scene of the play takes place with Prisypkin behind bars, caged in the local zoo as the main attraction. The director tells the audience of zoogoer’s that research has revealed Prisypkin to be a specimen of philistinus vulgaris, a “terrible humanoid simulator and most amazing parasite,” whose lifestyle and selfish habits resemble that of his vermin bedbugus normalis.22
The Bedbug is the product of Mayakovsky’s disillusionment at the meager
“gains” of the Revolution, though he is faithful the decades of future communism will transform man and society. Self-serving individuals such as Prisypkin would be unable to survive in a Communist society and would inevitably go extinct.
The other most notorious of Mayakovsky’s plays was The Bathhouse (1930), which set out to portray contemporary life. The title is allegorical, as the play is intended to wash away all the dirt in Russia. The Bathhouse is an absurdist play ridiculing the smugness of the Soviet elite who attempt to stop the march of time. In the third act of the play, the main character Pobedonosikov, a bureaucrat who becomes a leading spectator of
The Bathhouse, while appraising the first and second acts, criticizes the third act stating
22 Terras, 111.
15 “All this is laid on too thick, it doesn’t happen this way in life…Well, let’s take, for instance, that Pobedonosikov. It’s unseemly, whatever you say…We don’t have such people, it’s unnatural, unreal, unlikely! This must be redone softened, poeticized, rounded off.”23
Alexander Mikhailov describes this scene as perceptive in its depiction of the ruling-bureaucratic style of leadership through art, which had become a fixture of the system.24 Despite being a commercial failure, Mayakovsky considered The Bathhouse to be his best play.
By 1930 RAPP, with support from the Party, had gained the upper hand over the
Futurists. RAPP’s leader, Leopold Averbax (1903-30) considered the Futurist notion of the writer’s preeminence a threat to RAPP because it placed the writer above collective collaborative work.25 The party was aware of such a contradiction between
Mayakovsky’s fierce individualism and the role he attempted to play in the post- revolutionary period.
Demonized by critics and party-hacks, Mayakovsky was pushed to the fringes of the artistic realm. Alexander Mikhailov describes how Mayakovsky continued to make appearances, and give speeches, yet “he did all this somehow from inertia, having lost his usual confident tone.”26
Unwilling to be a fellow traveler, Mayakovsky applied for membership to RAPP, surrendering to its leadership. The other Futurist members found this decision baffling
23 Mayakovsky and Marshall, 226. 24 Alexander Mikhailov “At the Feet of a Giant: (Arguments Surrounding Mayakovsky)” New Literary History 23 (1992): 128. 25 Terras, 34. 26 Mikhailov, 129.
16 and it was to play a personal role in the dissolution of the Futurists as a group.
Mayakovsky justified his decision on political terms, “I have no friends. I am joining
RAPP. We shall see who (beats) whom. It’s ridiculous to be a fellow-traveler when one feels like a revolutionary.”27
For their part, RAPP trembled at the prospect of Mayakovsky joining their organization. Max Eastman argues that Mayakovsky failed politically because he remained a great poet: “The obvious fact that Mayakovsky failed as a leader of the proletarian culture because he was a momentous poet, and momentous poets are not institutions for cherish other people’s poetry, is another simple element of reality…”28
RAPP did eventually admit Mayakovsky only on the grounds that he undergo extensive re-training if he wanted to be crafted into proletarian writer.
Suicide
Before discussing possible explanations for Mayakovsky’s actions, it is necessary to understand the history and cultural dimensions of suicide in Russia. As suicide was a felony in Russia, it was usually considered a criminal rather than a political act. Suicide was to gain political implications in the 1790s when it first appeared as a form of protest.
Whereas the duel had a longstanding tradition of allowing the possible restoration of individual honor, noble suicide was less common. Duel and suicide could both fulfill a similar function: the restoration of individual honor. As Susan Morrissey asserts, noble suicide was defined by its concern for self-preservation of honor in the face of
27 A. Kemp-Welch Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928-1939 (New York: A. Kemp-Welch) 77. 28 Holquist 132
17 opposition: “As a heroic way to die, it could function as an affirmation of one’s dignity and autonomy as well as a form of political protest.”29
The tradition of noble suicide in Russian was to reach a highpoint at the end of the nineteenth century culminating with the Decembrist movement and subsequently became inextricably bound with political protest. Kondraty Ryleyev, poet and a leader of the
Decembrist Revolt, in his poem ‘The Citizen’ defines martyrdom as the only goal for honorable men. Heroic suicide could thereby bind personal honor and autonomy with political freedom and revolution.30
Beyond a personal motive, the philosophical justification for political suicide would come with the death of Russia’s first well-known dissident Aleksandr Radischev, who wrote A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790). Written during the reign of
Catherine the Great, Radischev’s greatest work is his imaginary journey through the
Russian countryside. Radischev describes in great detail acts of cruelty and exploitation permitted, as he felt, by serfdom. Seeing Russia’s practice of slavery as contradictory to the nature of man, Radischev attempted to awake the people to their plight.
Especially critical of the nobility, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow was immediately banned and Radischev was exiled to Siberia. After his return, Radischev worked briefly attempting to liberalize Russian law. . In 1802, however, after being threatened with a second exile to Siberia he committed suicide by drinking poison in front of his sons.31 The glory of self-sacrifice and unending service to ‘the people’ in the
29 Susan Morrissey “In the Name of Freedom: Suicide, Serfdom, and Autocracy in Russia” The Slavonic and East European Review 82 (2004): 272. 30 Morrissey, 272. 31 Morrissey, 277.
18 name of societal reform was to forever after become a basic tenet of the emergent revolutionary intelligentsia thereafter.
After this, an additional dimension was attached to protest suicide- the ultimate expression of individual liberty. The most radical form of protest, protest suicide is dying for a message. Protest suicide is a cry for change as the suicide attempts to draw people’s attention to what he/she feels is a moral wrongdoing.32 However, to venerate suicide as a heroic gesture in service to ‘the people’ may obscure the individual motivations and internal struggles which drive somewhere to self-destruction.
Common conception is that it was unrequited love, first with Lily Brik, wife of
Mayakovsky’s publisher, then later with a young Russian émigré, Tatiana Yakovleva, which did Mayakovsky in. The despair of love had been a common theme in
Mayakovsky’s literature from “A Cloud in Pants” through The Backbone Flute to “A
Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry” Though some have argued, Lily Brik chief among them, that Mayakovsky’s depression was not the result of external circumstances but an inner struggle. “The thought of suicide,” she writes, “was a chronic disease with Mayakovsky and, like a chronic disease, it grew aggravated under adverse conditions.”33 Like tragic love, suicide can also be persistently found his writings. “He was lured by the idea, Helen Muchnic writes of suicide, “and his eloquent denunciations of it may be due to the power of its attraction for him.”34
Victor Terras suggests that Gogol, as the favorite author of Mayakovsky’s youth, may have had a fundamental impact on his psyche. Both humorists, Gogol’s laughter was
32 Karin Andriolo “The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide” American Anthropologist 108 (2006): 102. 33 Helen Muchnic “Vladimir Mayakovsky” Russian Review 17 (1958): 116. 34 Muchnic, 117.
19 the product of despair, though he never proclaimed his suffering as candidly as
Mayakovsky. Yet there was a difference in the sources of their misery: “Whereas at the heart of Gogol’s unhappiness lay a sense of loss and inadequacy, Mayakovsky’s self-pity was based on a feeling of power, of an insufficiently appreciated grandeur.”35
Mayakovsky held a paradoxical relationship with the public. A self-loathing narcissist “he needed people not only for approval but for self-realization…for he can define himself only by means of opposition.”36
The poet’s preoccupation with suicide extends far back into his pre-revolutionary works to The Backbone Flute written in 1915. Lily Brik is the heroine to whom the poem is dedicated. Though a love poem, some of Mayakovsky’s most violent imagery, describing various instances of execution, occurs in The Backbone Flute. Terras describes
The Backbone Flute as an emotional cocktail of “hyperbolic conceits, which give the poet’s love, jealousy, and suffering truly gigantic or even cosmic proportions.”37 Upon hearing Mayakovsky recite The Backbone Flute in the summer of 1915, Maxim Gorky was struck when Mayakovsky suddenly break down and begin to cry.38
When confronted by the death of his fellow poet, Sergei Esenin, who had just hung himself in a Leningrad hotel on December 27, 1925, Mayakovsky was cornered into a re-evaluation of his own position. Esenin’s sudden death had ominous implications for the reality of the cultural situation in the people’s republic beyond the veneer of creative freedom of expression. It was uncomfortable, to say the least, to consider that the peasant poet, a man of the people, had killed himself. Seeing Esenin’s suicide as a challenge to
35 Terras, 81. 36 Mikhailov, 129. 37 Terras, 131. 38 Mikhail, 130.
20 both the gains of the Revolution and to his own position, similar to Esenin’s in its proposed populism, Mayakovsky chastised him for his cowardice in his famous poem
“To Sergey Esenin” (1926): “In this life it isn’t difficult to die; to build life is much more difficult.”39
And yet even in this denunciation of Esenin in defense of the Revolution there is a growing realization of its disappointments. Following the ravages of the Russian Civil
War (1918-1920), with over two million dead, the complete collapse of the economy replaced by bartering, and an agitated peasant and working class, the Bolsheviks, under the insistence of Lenin, did away with War Communism and in its place erected the New
Economic Policy, or NEP, in March 1921.
NEP was a concession on the part of the new regime and was marked by a resurgence of the free market as peasants were permitted to trade and sell their grain on payment of a tax-in-kind. Until it was done away with in 1928, the NEP period allowed for a degree of private ownership though the party retained its control over ‘the commanding heights of the economy,’ a reference to the banks, large industrial plants, and foreign trade.40 Though an economic success with a resurgence of grain imports into the cities, ideologically it was seen as a concession to the peasants with the abolishment of compulsive grain requisitioning.
From the Communist point of view, NEP was a retreat and a partial failure on the part of the Revolution with opportunist elements returning to fill the streets of Moscow.
Most despised of these were the traders, derisively referred to as NEPmen. Mayakovsky
39 Terras, 26. 40 Lewis Siegelbaum, “The New Economic Policy: Lenin Introduces NEP,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1921nep&Year=1921.
21 followed the party line by ridiculing the NEPmen and the excesses of private trade without drawing the line of criticism back to the party itself. Yet even Mayakovsky himself was infected with the virulent commercialization of the period, writing jingles and posters to sell any variety of products from cigarettes to candy wrappers.
Reflecting on his career, Mayakovsky observed that his twenty years of literary work had “mainly been a literary battering of heads, not literally but in the best sense of the word: at every point I had to defend literary views and fight for them against the fossilization that occurs in our thirteen-year old republic.”41 The conventional and everyday, which Mayakovsky had made his life mission to eradicate, had become political orthodoxy. No question his suicide was contributable to romantic hardships with his impossible love for Lily Brik festering, there were background factors of which the hopelessness of the cultural institution was center-stage. Victor Erlich describes the debilitating influence of the cultural institutions’ duplicity held over Mayakovsky: “But this time the dull force that crushed the poet’s ‘great love’ was to a large extent a matter of artificial barriers erected by the very regime that Mayakovsky had embraced as a major ally in his losing battle against the deadly pull of routine.”42
It seemed that Mayakovsky’s ominous allusions to suicide in The Backbone Flute were becoming increasingly prophetic as his depression sunk to new lows. Hoping to shed his ‘cloud of disapproval’ through joining RAPP, this only increased his isolation exaggerating his desperation. Although Bolshevism let Mayakovsky down, in all likelihood any stable, and consequently, routine existence would have.
41 Kemp-Welch, 186. 42 Erlich, 438.
22 The poet’s professed self-deprecation in the name of the masses proved to be in vain. Mayakovsky was torn between his own apparent talent and his wish to dissolve into and be one with the masses. This ideological self-immolation was incomplete for he was united on principle but ever aware of his innate difference from the masses he sought to serve. Mayakovsky was flawed in his fervent allegiance with Bolshevism as “the grim single-mindedness of the Bolshevik creed encouraged lyrical suicide and thus threatened the very qualities affirmed in the initial act of total defiance- untrammeled self- expression, emotional spontaneity.”43
The battles with the bureaucrats who had undermined his strength, amid accusations of being a reactionary Trotskyite, caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown and enter the Kremlin Hospital.44 Having sacrificed himself for the revolution,
Mayakovsky’s realization that he had wasted his talents was too much to bear. On the morning of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself in the heart. His body lay for three days at the hall of the Writers Federation with over a 100, 000 mourners paying their respects. The body was cremated on April 17. He sought to retain some dignity in his death, as the pistol had traditionally been a symbol honor, favored as it was by officers and noblemen in Tsarist Russia. I believe that Mayakovsky’s suicide was one such protest statement- convicting the regime of his murder.
In his last great poem At the Top of My Voice, unfinished at the time of his death, he wrote:
43 Erlich, 440. 44 Mayakovsky and Marshall, 16.
23 And I’m
fed to the teeth
with agit-prop,45
Never faltering in proclaiming his loyalty to the communist cause, “At the Top of
My Voice” ends with: “Appearing/before the CCC [Central Committee of the Party] of the bright years/of future//over a band/of poetic/racketeers and crooks, I shall raise my
Bolshevik party membership card//all hundred volumes/of my/party books”.46
Erlich recognizes the tragic irony of Mayakovsky’s snare: “…yet in his headlong rush toward a future worthy of a poet, he had propelled himself into a situation that rendered all genuine poetry impossible.” 47
Vladimir Mayakovsky left a suicide note dated April 12 and addressed to
“Everybody”. Unusual in its composition, for it is written in prose, the note is eerie in its resignation and concern for the mundane, such as the paying of income tax. The tone is starkly uncharacteristic of the unconventionality of Mayakovsky’s composition and the impassioned renegade tone characteristic of Vladimir Mayakovsky. It is quoted at length here for perspective:
Don’t blame anybody for my death and please don’t gossip. The deceased
hated gossip.
Mama, sisters, and comrades, forgive me—this is no way (I don’t
recommend it to others), but I have no other choice.
45 Mayakovsky and Marshall, 18. 46 Terras, 115. 47 Erlich, 440.
24 Lilya, love me.
Comrade government, my family are Lilya Brik, mama, my sisters, and
Veronika Vitoldovna Polonskaya.
If you can arrange for them a decent living, thanks.
The verses which I have started give to the Briks, they will figure them out.
As they say,
“the incident is closed.”
The love boat
wrecked by daily life.
I’m all even with life
And nothing would be gained by listing
mutual hurts,
troubles,
and insults.
Good luck.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Comrades of RAPP, don’t think I’m a coward. Seriously, it could not be helped. Greetings. Tell Ermilov that it is too bad I took down that slogan, ought to have fought it out. V.M.
25 In my desk drawer there are 2, 000 rubles, pay my income tax with it.
You’ll get the balance from Gosizdat. V.M.48
The act of the suicide had a theatrical element to it from the note written in prose to the circumstances of death. Mayakovsky had shot himself in the heart with the same revolver that had been filmed in the movie ‘Not for Money Born’ (1918) whose screenplay he had written based on Jack London’s novel Martin Eden. ‘Not for Money
Born’ deals with the career of a prolific writer who can struggle with adversity but flounders in the success he finds. The lead, played by Mayakovsky playing himself, attempts suicide but fails. Out of his failure he finds a new zest for life which then inspires an appreciation of earthly joys in others. The staging of his suicide may be seen as the final result of his gradual renunciation at hopes of redemption.
Legacy
Pasternak, "People and Positions"
There were two famous phrases about the time: that life
had become better, more joyous, and that Mayakovsky
was and remained the best and most talented poet of
our Soviet epoch.
Mayakovsky began to be cultivated forcefully, like
potatoes in the time of Catherine the Great. This was his
second death. He is not guilty of it.49
48 Terras, 37.
26 If a suicide intends to send a message through his/her death, that individual loses control over its meaning once they are gone. For a protest suicide to achieve its aim, the attention it garners would have to prompt corrective action. Karin Andriolo warns that a failure to recognize the protest suicide opens the possibility to be “killed twice, once by their own hands and once by the silence of our imagination.”50
This was to occur to the memory of Vladimir Mayakovsky in the decade following his death as Stalin’s regime was to appropriate his legacy for its own coercive means. Five years after his death in an editorial in Pravda on December 5 Mayakovsky was proclaimed by none other than Stalin to be “the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch!”51
Though this would seemingly point to a new liberalization in the arts promoting experimentation, the effect was the polar opposite. The critics praised the poet for features curiously uncharacteristic of Mayakovsky, such as his ‘simplicity and popular appeal.’52
Ostracized from the Soviet literary establishment for lacking these particular traits, this retreading of past positions was a tactical maneuver. A political move by Stalin dictating to the nation the new role the party was to play in literary matters, the consequence of his proclamation was to narrow literary debate. A. Kemp-Welch describes the paradoxical turnaround: “Instead of Futurist priorities, there began to be imposed a narrowly-defined, dogmatic and often backward-looking orthodoxy of socialist
49 Laura Urbaszewski “Canonizing the ‘Best, Most Talented’ Soviet Poet: Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Soviet Literary Celebration.” Modernism/modernity 9 (2002): 635. 50 Andriolo, 102. 51 Urbaszewski, 636. 52 Kemp-Welch, 198.
27 realism.”53 In order to consolidate this authority, Stalin found it necessary to pacify the intelligentsia as huge numbers of writers were either imprisoned or murdered.
Throughout the 1930s there was a multiplicity of celebrations and festivals most of which honored nineteenth-century Russian authors. These jubilees were meant to cast a line of continuity between the Soviet people’s cultural progress with that of the best cultural traditions. The Pushkin celebration, no doubt due to the eminence of the figure in question, was the largest of these celebrations spanning an entire year.
Associating Mayakovsky with Pushkin through literary jubilees, the intent was to portray Stalinist culture as the highest form of development, to make the Soviet epoch a part of history.54 The jubilee directed the proper way in which to interpret Mayakovsky and his works while fostering the appearance of public participation in national issues.
This approach concealed the historical context of the poems themselves; anyone, it was suggested, could understand Mayakovsky for he was their poet, a poet of the nation. The
1940 Mayakovsky jubilee created a narrative which Urbaszewski terms a “canonizing commentary.” The Mayakovsky celebration would inculcate the mass population in the creation of a new Mayakovsky. This “commentary” was exploited for coercive means as a method “to harness the intelligentsia, work out a new genealogy for Soviet poetry, and build on the…1937 Pushkin jubilee by promoting Mayakovsky as a representative of
Soviet cultural identity.”55
It guided interpretation not only of his literary works, but also of his life, personal motivations and psychology, and historical role in Soviet culture. The Mayakovsky
53 Kemp-Welch, 198. 54 Urbaszewksi, 644. 55 Urbaszewski, 639.
28 jubilee was the first such celebration of a Soviet author’s death and the first of a poet who had matured in the Soviet era. These Soviet jubilees combined the appearance of free and open debate with the behind-the-scenes reality of centralized control and censorship. The populism of these Soviet celebrations penetrated all aspects of the mass media and cultural life through print, photographs, and portraits organized in a portable exhibit. His pre-revolutionary pieces were ignored and communist ideals were projected into his earliest works. Slogans, posters, and excerpts from Mayakovsky’s most politically enlightened works were emphasized.
The scope of the Mayakovsky jubilee was tangible as souvenirs of all mediums were created from articles and memoirs to symphonies and film scripts. The public was encouraged to take part in the celebrations by attending reading circles, lecture series, and writing in to the local newspapers. This contributed to the dilution of the proper voice for
Mayakovsky’s life – that of his friends and relatives- by the public playing the role of scholars and historians.
Ubraszewski describes, the Soviet canonizing authority was complicit with political control as the authorities “destroyed the classic’s subversive potential not only through reinterpretation, but through…censorship, obligatory rewrites…and outright destruction of texts were all ways of maintaining this control.”56 Mayakovsky’s achievements became Soviet achievements- the two were synonymous. Reduced to a symbol, Mayakovsky was portrayed as the synthesis of literary and political advancement.
56 Urbaszewksi, 640.
29 In this regard, the Mayakovsky jubilee testified to the stability and future of the
Soviet state by proclaiming its triumphs. In the Soviet context, it was the poet and not the poetry that was held in highest regard. This canonization established the ways the public was to revere Soviet figures, contributing to Stalin’s cult of personality. Soviet literature, now an extension of the state and party, was to act upon its readership exerting the public to extol the values of good Soviet citizens. The 1930s literary celebrations, much like the pre-revolutionary literary celebrations, presented a uniform national culture and identity.
With Stalinist culture portrayed as the apex of all cultural development the literary debate which had raged throughout the experimental twenties was finally laid to rest.
To engineer Mayakovsky into a new Soviet hero the authorities crafted a heroic narrative of the same pattern as a hero of Socialist Realism. The official biography portrayed Mayakovsky as naïve who developed his class consciousness through his interactions with a mentor figure, in this case Gorky.
Ensuring the sole authorship of this commentary, the state authorities had to appropriate the sources of evidence, that is, Mayakovsky’s archive of manuscripts, notebooks, and drafts. After 1935, the state took over the role of caretaker from Lily Brik with a state directive issued in 1938 declaring all of Mayakovsky’s property to be that of the state’s, the seizure was complete. This seizure had both short-term and long-term implications for “the directive meant that the state could regulate and suppress not only existing texts, but also future production and verification of published memoirs and other sources of ‘fact’.57
57 Urbaszewski, 641.
30 After his canonization by the cultural establishment, the Mayakovsky exhibition in the Literary Museum was one of the most popular of the permanent exhibitions on display with crowds constantly inspecting it.
The power dynamics of this political-cultural exchange suggests a revisionist approach of the top-down model of Stalinist social control. For although, the political authorities controlled certain aspects of literary production such as censorship and publication, the cultural elite were the creators and practitioners of literary standards. As such, “the canonizing authority itself must be split into political power and cultural elite…”58
While physically threatening the cultural elite and the masses, the party needed to have the appearance of a separate autonomous, popular, cultural authority that approved of Soviet literary and cultural productions. This faux-bottom up initiative was an attempt to grant a degree of popular legitimacy. In acquiring the traditional authority of the intelligentsia in cultural matters, this covert approach was matched by violence in the purges of the 1930s in which many of the intelligentsia perished. Besides repression, the
Party attempted to wrest cultural authority from the intelligentsia through involvement of the masses. The canonization of Vladimir Mayakovsky was instrumental in this development, as the general population played a leading role in forging the
“commentary”. It established the ways the Soviet public was the to revere the classic poet redefining the future of literature in the Soviet Union for decades to come.
58 Urbaszewski, 639-640.
31 Yet the intellectuals were able to maintain a relationship with the public through participation in these jubilees. Anna Akhmatova, for example, was able to perform her verse, “Mayakovsky in 1913,” publicly for a Mayakovsky jubilee event in Leningrad.
Long after his death and even that of Stalin’s twenty-three years after,
Mayakovsky was still revered by the public. In 1973 after the celebration of the eightieth jubilee (!) of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Committee of the Union of Writers passed a resolution to reopen the exhibition ‘Mayakovsky- 20 years of work’ in the same halls in which it premiered in 1930. On the opening of the reconstructed exhibition, Konstantin
Simonov, secretary of the Union of Writers of the USSR since 1967, reaffirmed the
Soviet idolization of Mayakovsky as a monumental contributor to world literature when he said: “…Not only in the Soviet Union but throughout the world, Mayakovsky has established himself as the greatest poet of the Revolution and of the building of
Socialism.”59
And so forty-three years after his death Mayakovsky had climbed the ladder from the “greatest poet of our Soviet epoch” to the greatest in all the world. In his afterlife
Mayakovsky was propelled to greater heights than he could ever have hoped to achieve in his waking life. A popular biography of Mayakovsky appeared in 1965 reconciling the earlier conflict over Mayakovsky’s association with Futurism.
The legacy of Vladimir Mayakovsky in Russia remains divisive to the present day. Ivan Bunin, one of the most anti-Bolshevik authors of the émigré diaspora, despised
Mayakovsky, charging him with complicity in the violent excesses of the Communist
59 Vladimir Mayakovsky and David Elliott. Mayakovsky, Twenty Years of Work: An Exhibition from the State Museum of Literature, Moscow. (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art) 11.
32 regime. Bunin sentences Mayakovsky to “remain in the literary history of the Bolshevik years as the lowest, most cynical, and harmful servant of Soviet cannibalism in the area of literary encomiums.”60 Mayakovsky’s extremism, his critics argue, had fostered a generation of Felix Dzerzhinsky’s, leader of the Cheka, Soviet Russia’s first secret-police organization and forbearer to the KGB.
Boris Pasternak, Mayakovsky’s contemporary and longtime friend, is more sympathetic to the person of Vladimir Mayakovsky, seeing in his life and legacy a tragic tale of unfulfilled talent: “There will hardly be found another example in history when a man was so far advanced in a new proficiency should renounce it so fully…”61
60 Holquist, 3. 61 Holquist, 3.
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