This is the final essay for a class I took in my spring '10 semester at Purch, "The Russian Avant-Garde." It is about the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In case you are writing a paper about him too, the bibliography is fully included.
Peter Schranz
The Russian Avant-Garde
The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) had been famously called by Josef Stalin “the greatest poet of our socialist epoch,”1 but it is certain that the political upheavals that took place in Russia during the span of Mayakovsky’s creative activity operated far more as the harsh and real conditions (even if he preferred them theoretically) in which he grappled personally as a creator within a collectivist society. His work during the 1920’s with the artist Aleksander Rodchenko (1891-1956) developing advertisements for the state food store Mossel’prom –– an uncertain honor in a socialist state–– indicate both the collaborators’ attitudes concerning their place as creative people contained by the new economy. Their other collaboration in 1923 with Mayakovsky’s love poem Про Это, or Pro Eto (About That) and Rodchenko’s accompanying photomontages, are also vital in understanding the poet and his illustrator as concerned with and distressed by not primarily the post-revolution and Russia’s socialist realities, but the changes that the ‘new economy’ brought to the value of humanity.
The fact that Mayakovsky’s poetry abounds with a certain quality of conflict does not come as too much of a surprise, considering his well-fed interest in bringing about revolution. Writes Olga Carlisle, “Mayakovsky was in love with revolution, with everything modern and gigantic.”2 From the beginning he was certainly an open proponent of nothing less gigantic than the Czar’s abdication, having in 1908, at fifteen, become a member of the Bolshevik party and stirring up enough conflict to have himself imprisoned for eleven months.3
But Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry itself speaks more of the man’s ‘permanent revolution––’ to cite Leon Trotsky’s famous notion–– than the simplistic biographical details concerning his part in bringing about the Czar’s removal. By the end of his life it appears that his poetry takes on an attitude apparently antipodal to his earlier work as a “poet-agitator, a poet-propagandist, a poet who in every line of his work shows the desire to be an active participant in socialist construction.”4
His poem “At the Top of My Voice” which he read for the opening of his Twenty Years of Work exhibition in 1930, just months before his suicide, includes so telling a few lines as “I’m fed / to the teeth / with agit-prop, too / I’d like / to scribble love-ballads for you… But I / mastered myself / and crushed under foot / the throat / of my very own songs.”5 Carlisle translates the first lines as “Agitprop sticks in my craw, too.”
The message is quite clear, any way one looks at it, that Mayakovsky at the end of his life was much disillusioned not mainly by the country’s descent from the Bolshevik dream to Stalinist autocracy, but of the poet’s personal–– and therefore particularly un-collectivist–– dissatisfaction with his reputation “as an agitator and a rabble rouser.”6 This attitude is in violent contrast to the pre-revolution poem ‘A Cloud In Trousers,’ of 1915, in which he writes “Oh, why is it, / from where / into leisure class merry-making / thrusts a gigantic dirty fist!” Obviously at that point in the poet’s life he possessed a youthful relish for agitation and rabble rousing, his conflicts focused on the Czar.
It is easy to tell from those lines from At The Top of My Voice that Mayakovsky, despite his sentimental urges to pen ‘love ballads’ to a muse had stubbornly, coldly ‘mastered himself’ and choked his creative ‘throat––’ as he so ruthlessly wrote–– disdaining such sentimentalities in favor of productive collectivist strategies such as the agit-prop which caused his post-revolutionary success to so skyrocket.
The note of conflict with which he imbued At The Top of My Voice, the last poem he ever recited publicly, was between the individual and the collective, or the personal and the impersonal. I argue that his collaborations with Aleksander Rodchenko, these being his poem Pro Eto, the advertisements for Mossel’prom and for the other state-run businesses that they created together best demonstrate both sides of his conflict, that between the ancient trope of poetic whim and the drastically modern force of collectivist-state pressure. This is a conflict that remained unresolved at his suicide in 1930.
Pro Eto, published in 1923, and variously translated as ‘About That,’ ‘About This,’ and even ‘That’s What,’ was a lengthy poem inspired by something of a lovers’ tiff between Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik, during which she refused to see him for two months.7 Referring to the poem’s title, Victor Terras declares with an admirable but justified self-assuredness, “‘[t]hat’ is, of course, ‘love.’” 8
Certainly at first it would seem that way, either love or sex; considering the event that gave the poet rise to begin his work in the first place, and that he dedicated the poem “to her and to me.” It’s further made clear by Rodchenko’s choice to include on the cover a photograph a wide-eyed Lilya Brik literally enmeshed in the letters spelling out Pro Eto (fig. 1), communicating, perhaps obliquely, that the poem’s title is ‘about’ the poet’s love for her in particular.
But despite these accurate indications, it only incompletely illustrates the poem's endeavor. Pro Eto is not only a poem about Mayakovsky’s then-unrequited love for Brik, but weaves the jargon and memory of revolution throughout its verses. Making this other, much less ostentatious aspect of the poem especially clear is the section entitled, The Man From Seven Years Ago, which refers to when he wrote his poem Man, in the year 1916. The poem is about an early suicide attempt on a bridge over the Neva river, where for seven years he was calling to be rescued by himself.9
Writes the poet, “There –– / on the bridge’s parapets he leans… / Forgive me, Neva!” He goes on to reveal that his ‘self’ from seven years earlier is calling to him from across the ‘bridge of time’ so to speak, “My very own voice –– / it pleads / it entreats now: / Stop! / Don’t desert me! / Vladimir!”
Rodchenko illustrates this poem with a photomontage of several bridges (fig. 2); standing on one and peering into the river is a ‘goliathed’ figure representing Mayakovsky, so large as to suggest he would only be capable of wading in the Neva, or more suggestively that he would be incapable of drowning under ‘that surging.’ Below the giant on the bridge the artist places the poet sitting down impotently, his face dropped upon his palms in despair, illustrating the lines “Vainly I rumple / and paw my ears!” This ‘curled-over’ Mayakovsky is dwarfed and belittled (“It was I / who summoned you. / Don’t try to escape!”) by the impossibly giant version of himself who looks down upon him.
The poet writes with hardly-concealed sarcasm that he may be saved from suicide by the beaurocratic processes of the state: “Carry the Resolution of the Executive Committee. / Confiscate my agony, / rescind it.” These lines serve to form the sort of equilibrium of the two sets of unrequited love existing throughout the piece: Mayakovsky is in The Man From Seven Years Ago grappling with his loss of ‘Savior-Love;’ unrequited and, without a savior, damned. As the lines “Carry the Resolution… rescind it” imply, his love for the State, which clearly is not going to “confiscate [his] agony,” goes ignored and unreturned as well.
Eerily enough, though it is hardly possible to establish any proof that this was Mayakovsky’s intention, the fact that the poem is dated to 1923 here sets the poet up as himself another Man from Seven Years Ago, whose call for help in 1930 goes tragically and finally unheeded.10
Victor Terras writes of Mayakovsky’s ‘social angle [intruding]’ upon the poem, that “the tribulations of love must become a thing of the past as ‘lovers’ become ‘comrades.’”11 This appears to be a synthesis of the conflict in The Man From Seven Years Ago between the pain the poet felt earlier in his life, during, as it had been in 1916, pre-revolution, and the pain of 1923 Mayakovsky, who cannot “Carry the Resolution of the Executive Committee” and “Confiscate [the] agony” as his earlier self begs him, but who must try to become as emotionally post-revolutionary as he felt politically. Clearly Rodchenko’s illustrations of these ‘two Mayakovskys,’ ––one towering over and thus reminding the other of his desperate need for “Savior-love––” professes a certain understanding “that the basic conflict in the poem is between ‘the fiery wings of October’ and other symbols of a communist future… and the ‘snug little burrow’ of personal life.”12 In other words Rodchenko’s photomontage demonstrates that the poem’s internal quarrel is that between the collectivistic life of the future with the still-relevant individualistic life of the past, looming over the poet, and over–– a contemporary reader might realize–– oneself as well.
1923 was the veritable ‘year of collaboration’ for Mayakovsky, as he also worked with the typographer El Lissitzsky (1890-1941) to compile a short collection of earlier poems called Для Голоса, or Dlia Golosa (translated as For Reading Out Loud, and more recently as For The Voice). It is a work of revolutionary propaganda, ‘for reading out loud’ the better to reach a larger collective ear. This work is notable chiefly for Lissitzky’s use of ‘typographical elements’ to illustrate the Mayakovsky’s poems. For example, “[h]e used... not only letters... but also a whole range of underutilized accessories: thick, fine, and dotted lines; grids; diverse geometric forms.”13 The illustrator created an image of a ship, complete with mast and flag, entirely from slash-marks, dashes, underscores and other typographical characters (fig. 3) for Mayakovsky’s poem Left March, which he had written in 1918.
The poems are characteristically revolutionary in nature, due probably to their being written in close temporal proximity to the revolution itself. Left March, to go on, is a rally to the new Soviet state that was then beleaguered by fourteen interventionist nations.14 The Tale of the Little Red Hat, written in 1917, (illustrated by Lissitzky with a scarecrow-like figure donning a bright-red hyphen-hat (fig 4.)) tells a sickly humorous story of a Cadet who is revealed to be anti-revolutionary when his red hat falls off after “a great wind blew right through the state,” revealing “that Cadet’s true color was black.” Finally, “Revolution’s red wolf caught that Cadet / And everyone knows how big’s a wolf’s diet.”
Dlia Golosa can be thought about as a futurist showcase of the two artists responsible for it. Lissitzky’s use of typographical characters to represent other objects preceded ‘ASCII art’ by nearly sixty years, and coupled with the subject matter of Mayakovsky’s poetry, the lingering sense one remains with at the end is more or less ‘out with the old, in with the new.’
It is intriguing to consider the reason that Mayakovsky chose to have his then-five and -six year old poems published as Dlia Golosa at the time that he did, in 1923, when he was also busy working closely with Rodchenko on Pro Eto. The choice seems to indicate that in this year the tug on the poet between social activist ‘rabble-rousing,’ and that most tempting ‘snug little burrow’ even found its way into conflicting his collaborations themselves.
Analyzing each collaboration with the other in mind–– something their contemporary audience, treated to two quite remarkable collaborations in one year, probably did not need to force–– it becomes clear that the short Dlia Golosa was for Mayakovsky a kind of manic addendum to Pro Eto. It was an attempt to compensate for what he no doubt considered a lapse into mawkish sentimentality with a nostalgic glance, or more significantly a propagandistic glance, back to the momentous days surrounding the October Revolution.
Not much long after they had completed Pro Eto, in that most pivotal and active year 1923, Mayakovsky and Rodchenko began working on printing advertisements, initially for the department store Государственный Универсальный Магазин (Gosudarstvennyi Universal’nyi Magazin or GUM).15 His choice to solicit this type of work is mysterious, at best, considering the capitalist trappings of advertising in general. The mystery is at least partly rectified by the wry, ironic tone adopted by Mayakovsky for his jingles.
Writes Christina Kiaer: “Mayakovsky… addresses the pervasive nature of consumption in capitalist–– or in this case, NEP semicapitalist–– society: ‘There is no room for doubting or thinking–– everything for the woman is only at GUM.’”16 It is important to note that while the poet does not appear to be quite serious in the matter, that the jingle here takes the form of relatively traditional propaganda, in that it espouses the “don’t think, just do” philosophy, only in this case for a department store instead of, for example, the military (although both at this time were of course managed by the state). Kaier points out that “[t]he humor of their GUM ads is based on a rueful acknowledgement of the excessiveness of consumption,” or in other words that the two revolutionaries had full understanding that what they were doing was what is more modernly referred to as ‘selling out,’ and so made their intent completely transparent through the ironic advertisements. They justified their new racket “if it could bring Nepmen into GUM to spend money in a state owned store.”17
Later on, and more famously, Mayakovsky wrote jingles for Mossel’prom, Moscow Food Stores, “which ended with the rhyming lines ‘nigde krome / kak v Mosselprome’: ‘Nowhere else but in the Moscow Food Stores.’”18
The earliest advertisements demonstrate some of the most ridiculous ideas thrown about by Mayakovsky and Rodchenko. The poet, in a 1923 brainstorm (which Rodchenko did not execute) for an ad for Посолские (Embassy) cigarettes, “accompanies his dubious slogan ‘Even children, giving up their pacifiers, smoke Embassy’ with an even more questionable drawing of a child sitting in wide-eyed shock, a giant smoking cigarette stuffed in his mouth.”19 (fig. 5) This must have been the time during which he saw most clearly the somewhat illogical nature of his new business.
One rather multi-layered jingle he wrote later for another brand of cigarettes, Шутка (Joke), which was a popular and cheap Mossel’prom brand, goes a little something like this: “Not as a joke, but seriously: tastier than oranges, more perfumed than roses.” Kiaer writes that at this time “oranges and fresh roses were luxuries on the NEP market, while low-quality, state-produced tobacco… was affordable to everyone.” She goes on to suggest that the slogan “consciously invokes working-class camaraderie: ‘we don’t need the Nepman’s oranges’”20
Rodchenko’s illustration (fig. 6) includes in particular the attention-commanding aspects all effective advertisements include: in this case two giant exclamation points flanking the enlarged name of the product. The advertisement, as previously mentioned, is in some ways rather transparent, Rodchenko at least runs the most direct course towards commanding the attention of passers-by: simply two giant exclamation points. On the other hand Mayakovsky’s intentional suggestion of “working class camaraderie” is a little puzzling at first, as obviously at that point he was a successful and well known poet who had increasingly little in common with the working class. One way of putting this thought is that Mayakovsky likely would have had no trouble affording roses or oranges.
However, in terms of my argument it is not so puzzling, but quite fitting that the poet would here include–– in a moment of anxiety when he realized his separate distinction from the working class–– a jingle specifically targeted towards those for whom money loomed a larger concern. The advertisement for Шутка cigarettes, indeed, was no joke; Mayakovsky wrote it as much for Mossel’prom and for their proletarian consumer base as for himself.
Because the early advertisements for Mossel’prom were developed so closely after Pro Eto had been completed, that they reflect the poem’s conflicting attitudes is not surprising. The ironic structure that the advertisements assume quite instantaneously speaks about the peculiarly unexamined absurdity of the socialist advertisement as something that exists at all, but does so in a sort of sanctioned arena that does not threaten the revolution or the artists’ position therein.
Kiaer begins to reflect this sentiment as she writes that the ads “reveal the same ironic doubleness [as Pro Eto] of protest against and desire for the objects of the old byt,21 and they similarly attempt to organize that desire in the service of a transformed novyi byt.” In the case of Pro Eto, that desire is for love, and it is for commodities in the case of the advertisements.
This is only a partial overview of Mayakovsky’s and Rodchenko’s advertising collaborations; besides cigarettes, they also produced ads for cooking oil, tea, cookies, and other such grocery. But the fact is that they were all executed with a grain of salt. The poet’s constant conflict between the personal and impersonal manifests itself at this point in his career as an inability to take seriously the idea that a socialist culture has the same need for consumerist propaganda as a capitalist one. The ads are a temporary synthesis for the poet; they meld together for a moment his yearning for the 'old byt' and the less questioned and less absurd notion of consumerism under the Czar; and his need to be the ‘poet of the people,’ who, he hoped would see his ads and thus consider him ‘one of them.’
Indeed, through his career the poet left evidence of his struggle to reconcile and contain both of these impulses, and what I can declare with the most confidence is that he was only partly successful doing so. And his Pro Eto illustrates his ‘id’s’ wish to return to the days of individualistic emotional involvement, using Rodchenko’s photomontages of people in anguish, while Dlia Golosa satisfies his ‘superego’s’ desire to move forward into the post-revolution, towards the novyi byt, employing Lissitzky’s mechanical typographical illustrations to embody the collectivist future the poet felt he should want. Works Cited: 1Edward J. Brown. Mayakovsky, A Poet in Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) 301
2Olga Carlisle. Poets on Street Corners (New York: Random House Inc, 1968) 199
3Ibid, 197
4Herbert Marshall. Mayakovsky (New York: Hill And Wang, Inc. 1965) 398
5Ibid, 404
6Brown, 355
7Victor Terras. Vladimir Mayakovsky (Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, 1983) 81
8Ibid, 80
9Marshall, 222
10Ibid, 223
11Terras, 80
12Ibid, 80-81
13Yve-Alain Bois and Christian Hubert, "El Lissitzky: Reading Lessons." October (Winter 1979): 113-128.
14Marshall, 129
15Christina Kiaer. Imagine No Possessions, The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005) 158
16Ibid 159
17Ibid 162
18Brown, 262
19Kiaer, 185
20Ibid, 175-176
21Ibid, 158