Brik and Mayakovsky 9783111396606, 9783111034058

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SLAVISTIC PRINTINGS AND REPRINTINGS edited by C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

301

VAHAN D. BAROOSHIAN

BRIK AND MAYAKOVSKY

MOUTON PUBLISHERS THE HAGUE • PARIS • NEW YORK

Vahan D. Barooshian Professor of Russian Wells College Aurora, New York

ISBN 90 279 7826 3 © Copyright 1978 by Mouton Publishers, The Hague. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form - by photoprint, microfilm, or any other means - nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher. Typesetting: Georg Wagner, Nòrdlingen. - Printing: Karl Gerike, Berlin. - Binding: Liideritz & Bauer Buchgewerbe GmbH, Berlin. Printed in Germany

Each generation brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art and has its own uses for art. T. S. Eliot

PREFACE

Osip Maksimovich Brik is one of the most elusive, mysterious and legendary figures in the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century. In addition to this, a recent set of literary memoirs, which point out Brik's ties with the Soviet secret police—the Cheka—have cast him in a sinister and controversial light.1 There is almost no biographical information about him and, characteristically, Brik never wrote about himself. He has made, however, a peculiar kind of personal history, not so much through the written word but through the spoken word, the spell of personality and the fertility of his ideas which overwhelmed many of his contemporaries, especially those who knew him well.2 Soviet bibliographical sources have listed a bare minimum of the extraordinary range and quality of his published works.3 Because of Brik's formalist and independent literary orientation, the efforts of certain Soviet "scholars" to banish Brik from Soviet literary history have been largely effective, despite Brik's passionate support of the Bolshevik regime after 1917.4 In view of his diverse activities and his prominence in the literary, artistic and film debates of the 1920's and after, it is indeed a very strange irony that there has been to date no substantial study of Brik's compelling life and work. He does, however, deserve a much better fate, for he is one of the brilliant, commanding theoreticians of the Russian avant-garde of this century, whose role, influence, contribution and significance are of impressive dimensions. The almost total lack of bibliographical documents compounds an investigation of Brik's life in particular. In effect, one might say that Brik's personal life exists largely in the minds of those who knew him, of whom today there are only a rapidly dwindling few. This study seeks to demonstrate, however, that Brik's life as a whole is basically an integral part of the history of Russian Formalism, Cubo-Futurism, the Russian artistic avant-garde, and of the life of Vladimir Mayakovsky. This book is an attempt, therefore, primarily to portray the historical

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Brik and to describe and assess his life, work, role and significance in terms of the history of those movements and against the background of revolutionary Russia, from approximately 1915 to 1930. The book also defines Brik's and his wife's relationship to Mayakovsky, with whom they lived for some fifteen years until Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930; and it explains the Briks' efforts after 1930 to find a place for Mayakovsky in the history of Soviet literature. Mayakovsky at times appears to be so much a part of the lives of the Briks that various aspects of Mayakovsky's own personal life, views and activities are necessarily treated so as to illuminate the views and the activities of the Briks. This is the substance of the first four chapters. The last chapter concerns the ironic fate of the Briks in the Soviet Union today. If this book has one principal aim, it is to discover, without polemical intent, an objective path to the historical truth about Brik. No doubt a great deal of research still remains to be done on Brik's life and work, and this factor obviously does not make the present study complete or final, but a kind of preliminary investigation. Since this study is essentially about Brik, the bibliography contains only a list of his published works. Up to 1930, the list is, as far as can be established, complete. After 1930, the list is less than complete. A complete bibliography of Brik's works would require many months, if not years, to establish, including archival materials. Those who are interested in other aspects of this study can easily consult the sources in the notes for each chapter. My debts to individuals and institutions for this study are many. To Professor Vladimir Markov I am indebted for continuous encouragement and advice. Professors Nina Berberova, Herman Ermolaev, and Raymond Jaffe offered me valuable criticism. I deeply appreciate the helpful assistance of Ms. Dorothy Baker and Candace VanAuken. I am very grateful to the International Research and Exchanges Board and the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education for the opportunity to do research in the Soviet Union, without which this study would not have been possible. The Russian Research Center of Harvard University allowed me to use its rich facilities, for which I am grateful. I thank President Frances 'Sissy' Farenthold of Wells College for a grant in support of this research. To many other American and Russian individuals and institutions I extend my sincere gratitude. Needless to say, I alone bear responsibility for the views expressed in this book. A final word on the system of transliterating Russian into English, which always seems to pose complex problems and can never satisfy

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everyone. I have basically used in this book the "popular" system as described in the admirable study of Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, 1973), p. vi. As Brown indicates, this system has two advantages: it provides those who know no Russian the sound equivalents of Russian in English and creates no difficulty for those who know Russian in identifying the Russian sources. If I offend anyone by using that system, I ask to be forgiven.

Notes 1. See Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York, 1970), p. 172. This account is inaccurate and contradictory, for Mrs. Mandelstam says that "In Party circles he [Brik] had powerful sponsors, particularly among Chekists with artistic and literary inclinations. He maneuvered with great dexterity and at considerable risk to himself, but the prize was won by Averbakh, who, with his RAPP [The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers], was a latecomer in the contest" (p. 172, italics added). We shall deal with Brik's connections with the Cheka below. Mrs. Mandelstam should also know that it was Boris Malkin, a close associate of Brik, who befriended her husband in the late 1930's. It was Brik who provided Malkin with the money to give to her husband. See Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned (New York, 1974), p. 310. 2. A Soviet scholar writes of Brik: "I became acquainted with Osip Maksimovich Brik in the second half of the 1930's, when he was far from young. His completely youthful energy startled me—he was charged with ideas, like a Leyden jar with electricity." A. Dymshits, "OMB," in his Zvenya pamyati (Moscow, 1968), p. 370. This is one of the extremely rare "positive" accounts of Brik in the Soviet Union. 3. For example, Sovetskoe literaturovedenie i kritika (Moscow, 1966). 4. See A. Koloskov, Tragediya poeta, "Ogonyok, No. 26 (June 1968), pp. 18-19. According to A. Sheshukov, Brik "passed through the history of our literature as a failure, as an absolutely unproductive figure." Neistovye revniteli (Moscow, 1970), p. 41.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Notes Bibliography of Brik's Works Index

vii 1 43 73 109 125 133 149 155

CHAPTER ONE

Osip M. Brik was born in Moscow in 1888 to a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. His father was a diamond and coral merchant who travelled extensively. His mother was a well-educated member of the intelligentsia. In his youth, Brik often travelled with his father to the eastern regions of Russia, an activity which he continued throughout his life. His favorite pastimes were buying gifts for others, chess (of which he was a master), and reading of the most diverse and extensive kind. He usually read about two or three books daily. He would often go to a bookstore where he would, after reading a book there, leave with an armful of books. During his adult life, Brik maintained a "working" library of over four-thousand books.1 As a student in the gymnasium, Brik was simply brilliant and easily seized the attention of his classmates. His eloquence, keen and destructive wit, magnetic personality and formidable intellectual powers inspired envy, or fear and hatred, or admiration or worship.2 No one who knew Brik ever remained, or could remain, indifferent to him. Humbug, snobbery and pretense were instinctively alien to his social character. He drew people to himself—regardless of social class or origin—by speaking to their concerns and interests. When Brik was still at the gymnasium, he became engrossed in the political problems of the day. He read all the works of Marx, Engels and the Russian revolutionary democrats. He formed his own Marxist circle to discuss those problems. In 1905, he took part in political demonstrations against the Russian autocracy, which led to his expulsion from the gymnasium. Brik never completed the gymnasium, but desired to continue his education in law. In 1906, he passed the entrance examinations for the Law Faculty at Moscow University. Brik chose that field because it did not require him to attend lectures and classes, thus providing him more time to devote his attention to politics. In 1910, he successfully completed his studies and graduated with

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a degree in law. Brik never practiced law during Ms life, but did apply his legal knowledge in the Cheka during the revolutionary years 1918-1921. In 1905, Brik met Lily Yurevna Kagan, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family. She was then a thirteen-year old student at the Valitskaya gymnasium for girls, where Brik frequently gave talks on the principles of political economy. Lily's interests were mainly in painting, sculpture, dance and ballet. Their personalities apparently complemented each other. In any event, Lily's interest in Brik was essentially intellectual. Their friendship ultimately resulted in marriage in 1912. The marriage made Brik an object of envy, since he, not a particularly attractive man, had married a most charming, cultured and beautiful woman, who was eventually considered a Beatrice of her age.3 Three years after their marriage, the Briks made the momentous acquaintance of, and subsequently became permanently associated with, the young Futurist poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. He was introduced to them by Lily's older sister, Elsa, whom Mayakovsky had been courting at the time. This association was of the most profound significance not only for the three of them, but also for the history of Russian literature. First, it inspired some of the most moving lyric poetry of this century, dedicated largely to Lily Brik. Second, it resulted in Brik's brilliant formalist studies of poetic sounds, rhythm and syntax, and in the formation of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz). Brik was, as will be seen, the principal organizer of this movement. Third, the association rescued Mayakovsky from suicide, with which he had been obsessed prior to his meeting with the Briks. The major source of Mayakovsky's despondency at the time was his feeling that his poetic talent was unrecognized and misunderstood, a feeling which he never really overcame during his lifetime; and this feeling was not without justification or objective reasons. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this association made Mayakovsky one of "the most original Russian poets of all time . . ." 4 In other words, Mayakovsky, as we have come to know him in Russian literature, would have been largely an insignificant poet without the Briks; and it is Osip Brik who shares a measure of responsibility for shaping and directing Mayakovsky's art from 1915 to his suicide in 1930.5 In his autobiography, Mayakovsky noted that his meeting with the Briks in July 1915 was a "Most Joyful Date." 6 In her published memoirs, Lily Brik is much more revealing, perhaps somewhat con-

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tradictory or ambivalent, in her own attitude toward Mayakovsky. Her observations perhaps penetrate the riddle of Mayakovsky's personality: his ability to repel also contained a large measure of attraction or fascination; and she was apparently defining her own attitude toward him. She observes that in her initial meeting, the crude, iconoclastic and turbulent Mayakovsky frightened her and Brik. On another meeting, she was repelled by his vaunted pride, arrogance and claims of poetic genius. Not only did Mayakovsky believe his poetry was misunderstood and unrecognized, but that it was also misread. Lily goes on to say that she did "not particularly" like his poetry. When, however, Mayakovsky read his "A Cloud in Trousers" to them, she and Brik were overwhelmed: "It was just what we had been waiting for for so long."7 While Lily does not discuss Mayakovsky's reaction to her or hers to him, she does reveal Mayakovsky's decisive impact on Brik: "Osya took the notebook that contained the manuscript and did not relinquish it all night. He kept reading i t . . . Since that day Osya fell in love with Volodya and began to waddle; he started to speak in a bass voice [like Mayakovsky's] and wrote poetry that ended thus: I myself will die when I feel like it, and in the list of voluntary victims I'll write my surname, name and patronymic and the day on which I shall die. I'll pay my debts to every store, I'll buy the last almanac and will await my ordered grave while reading A Cloud in Trousers.8 These poetic reflections seem to reveal Brik's thorough fascination and identification with the revolutionary and blasphemous assault of Mayakovsky's poem on society and the many-sided potential of his poetic talent. In his very first published article in 1915, entitled "Bread!," which is a brief commentary on Mayakovsky's poetry, Brik castigated the Russian Symbolist poets for their escape from reality. As Brik saw it, their poetry was merely a diet of sweets—cake, honey, ice-cream—which only caused illness for readers. At last, Brik suggested, Mayakovsky's poetry provided the daily bread of living reality and of revolutionary necessity—an occasion for joy and celebration.9 For Brik, Mayakovsky represented the artistic avatar of his own political and social views, and perhaps even the projection of himself as a revolutionary artist. He now saw his own personal future in

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Mayakovsky as a unique poet, and dedicated his whole life to his creative development as such. It is also in this sense that Brik lacked personal ambition.10 Since Mayakovsky was living in abject poverty and was unable to find a publisher for his rebellious poem, Brik published it at his own expense, albeit in excised form because of the censor's rejection of the blasphemous section, Part IV. As Mayakovsky noted: " A Cloud was feathery. The censor blew through it. Six pages of continuous dots."15 For Mayakovsky, the association with the Briks opened up a new world for him both culturally and intellectually and gave him purpose and a new sense of mission. He at last achieved, as a direct result of Brik's publication of his poetry, the poetic recognition which he so eagerly sought and deserved. He came to admire Brik's intellectual versatility and poise, his iron self-confidence and especially, as he remarked, Brik's "absolute taste in literature."12 Although he and Brik shared common views on a political and artistic revolution, Mayakovsky became dependent on Brik for political and poetic guidance, direction, and discipline, particularly during the revolutionary period and after. It may very well be that Brik served as a certain "father" figure not only for Mayakovsky, whose own father had died when he was thirteen years old, but for Lily, too, whose father had died in 1915 when she was twenty-three years old. This new association had the effect of severing Mayakovsky's "poetic" relationship with David Burliuk, the founder of Russian Cubo-Futurism, who had been Mayakovsky's early mentor and major source of financial support. Their friendship, however, was never impaired. As for Mayakovsky's relationship to Lily Brik, her enigmatic personality, intelligence, charm, beauty and imposing talents had an arresting effect on him. For her, the idea of a poet declaiming his love for her, of dedicating his poetry to her, with the attendant fame that was involved, was profoundly appealing and nourishing to her ego, even though it did not, perhaps, demand a reciprocal love. This may be why the theme of unrequited and frustrated love and the quest for the elusive and unattainable woman are so dominant in Mayakovsky's lyric poetry; and it may very well be that Lily actually played out this role in her own life, either consciously or unconsciously. But this was also perhaps merely a creative, productive poetic theme that contained the potential for manifold variations. Although Mayakovsky "searched" for love poetically, or wrote of its frustration and torment, in reality he possessed the substance of love because in 1915 he married Lily Brik, who always

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lived with Brik (and Mayakovsky) until his death in 1945 despite her third marriage after Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930 and Brik's second marriage in 1928. This unusual relationship suggests that Brik was the one great love in Lily's and Mayakovsky's lives—the apex of the triangular association. As Lily described the relationship, with understandable reticence: "When I told him [Brik] that Mayakovsky and I had fallen in love, we all decided never to part. Then Mayakovsky and Brik were already close friends, men bound to each other by close ideological interests and joint literary work. Such is the way it came to be that we lived our life, both spiritually and largely in the same place, together." 13 Nevertheless, one has little, if any, difficulty in understanding the solid, integral nature of this rather complex but "creative" triangular association which lasted for fifteen years; and it was the political and personal tensions and the heated literary controversies in the late 1920's that began gradually to erode the association, ending in Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930 —a tragedy of both circumstances and character. When he met Mayakovsky in July 1915, Brik was a volunteer, privileged officer in the Russian army and was connected with a military automobile school in St. Petersburg. In September 1915, Mayakovsky was called up for military service on the war front. Prior to this, in 1914 Mayakovsky was eager to join the Russian army, but was rejected as a political unreliable because of his prison record and his political activity as a Bolshevik propagandist in 1908. By September 1915, the bloodshed and horror of war had engendered "disgust and hatred" in him. A terrifying gloom began to grip Mayakovsky. Brik came to his rescue: he ingeniously persuaded the military authorities at the automobile school to which he himself was attached that Mayakovsky, as an accomplished artist, would be a much greater asset to the army as an automobile designer than as a soldier, who would panic at the sight of blood.14 Mayakovsky's recollection of this episode makes Brik the central figure in his life at the time: Called up by the army. The front is where I don't want to go. Pretend I was a draftsman. At night I take lessons from some engineer in drawing automobiles. Publishing matters are even worse. Soldiers are forbidden to publish. Brik alone gives me joy. Buys up all my poetry at 50 kopeks a line. He published "The Backbone Flute" and "A Cloud in Trousers."15

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Mayakovsky, however, did not remain a draftsman for very long. He soon became a billeting officer, responsible for finding rooms for soldiers who had returned from the front lines. This work afforded him greater time to devote to his poetic and political activities. He was frequently "on leave." He had his own private quarters and other privileges (food, clothing and allowances); and on January 13,1917 he was awarded a silver medal for dedicated service.16 Shortly after, Brik himself was called for duty on the war front because the military authorities concluded that there were too many Jews in the automobile school and decided to send them to the front immediately, in the course of twenty-four hours.17 Since Brik, too, was opposed to the war and was determined to remain with Mayakovsky, the new and sudden situation posed no particular challenge to Brik. On the evening that his company awaited a train to depart to the front, Brik slipped away to change into civilian clothes; then he returned and, in his usual sociable manner, bid farewell to his friends as they boarded the train. He then put on his military uniform and returned to military headquarters to explain that he had missed his company. An officer assigned Brik temporarily to a military barrack in St. Petersburg. Brik, however, soon discovered that he was a forgotten man there and felt free to resume civilian life, since he was a soldier without a company. He occasionally donned his uniform to demonstrate to others that he was still in the army and to check in and out of the military barrack, especially when he needed a chauffuered military vehicle to conduct his business, deliver gifts to his friends and bring books from the bookstores. In this way he eluded military service for two years. Shklovsky remarks that Brik "remained home for two years. Dozens of people came to see him; he published books, but no one could find him."18 But the elusive Brik was very much visible to some and in the center of things—deep in the world of poetry. After he, and perhaps Lily, too, recovered from the intoxication with Mayakovsky's poetry, Brik could not remain in a sea of poetry without penetrating its surface fascination, without posing the fundamental, fruitful questions: How was poetry made, organized, or better, how was it produced? What were its basic ingredients, the secret and mystery of its charm, its characteristic formal components? In particular, what comprised the captivating qualities of Pushkin's poetry? Why was Pushkin's poetry so unique, and why was the poetry of those who consciously tried to imitate his poetry, in both form and content, so dull, pale and undistinguished by comparison? In order to answer these questions and solve the enigma of

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Pushkin, Brik, without any background and training in poetry or literature, but with just a former "passive" interest in them, plunged into the poetic world of Pushkin, Lermontov and Yazykov, a world which he mastered with consummate ease. Brik's study of the sound patterns or "sound repetitions" (zvukovye povtory) in the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov added a new critical dimension to the understanding of poetic "laws." Brik boldly challenged the traditional notion of poetry as the "art" or "language of images" and asserted that sound patterns were closely related to semantic levels in poetry and to its "musicality." These patterns (or repetitions) were not arbitrarily appended to rhyme and alliteration, but existed intrinsically as a "complex product of the interaction of the general laws of euphony." Rhyme and alliteration were merely "external manifestations" of those laws and did not exhaust "the instrumentation of poetic language." In his analysis of Pushkin's and Lermontov's poetry, Brik discovered the repetitious patterns of a consonant and consonantal groupings, enclosed by various vowels, in different parts of poetic lines to engender a "musical" effect. He noted that the "acoustical significance" of the repetitious combinations of vowels, consonants and consonantal groupings lay in the following scheme: 1) stressed vowels, which impart assonance; 2) stressed consonants, which impart alliteration; 3) unstressed consonants, which comprise the sound patterns or repetitions; 4) unstressed vowels, which provide the general sound background because of their inability to form definite sound combinations in view of their weak acoustical complexion (okraska). Finally, Brik concluded by drawing an analogy between a poem and a painting: in the latter, the "central figures" were its most obvious distinctive aspect, but which did not comprise its totality. Similarly in a poem: its instrumentation was a unified whole, consisting not only of "central assonances," but also the totality of its "sound" structure, or material. When Brik was working on the sound patterns in Pushkin's poetry, Mayakovsky suggested to him that he discuss his research with a young literary critic, Viktor Shklovsky, a passionate admirer of Futurist poetry.19 Lily also suggested that her childhood friend, Roman Jakobson, a brilliant philologist, also join the discussion. Thereafter, other promising philologists participated: Lev Yakubinsky, Evgeny Polivanov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris Kushner. Subsequent meetings were held at the Brik-Mayakovsky apartment, where philological

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papers and reports were read aloud for critical discussion. As Viktor Erlich rightly observes, "Even though many of the subjects discussed during the 'evenings at the Briks' would sound abstruse, if not dull, to a non-specialist, there was an air of intellectual excitement about these unique gatherings, combining the earnestness of the linguist's laboratory with the buoyant flippancy of a literary cafe. It was in this atmosphere of 'gay science,' where a clever paradox counted for almost as much as a new concept, that the initial premises of Formalism were being hammered out." 20 Mayakovsky occasionally took part in these linguistic discussions, but was more of a reverent observer. As Lily Brik points out in her memoirs, "Mayakovsky understood nothing in the theory of poetic language; he could not even remember poetic meters. What he did not know he never discussed, but he loved and was able to listen for hours to the discussions of the members of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language" [Opoyaz/.21 These discussions impressed upon Mayakovsky the significance and necessity of formalist studies of literature and poetry which he so staunchly defended throughout his life. Opoyaz was thus founded in the Brik-Mayakovsky apartment, which became a vital, creative meeting ground for literary and linguistic discussions. Their circle of friends expanded to include not only philologists and Futurist poets, but also artists and novelists, and later, film directors, critics, actors, actresses, musicians, political commissars and, interestingly enough, Chekists with cultural tastes or tendencies, or with a certain thirst for culture. Lily remarks that "so many people came to visit us that our three-room apartment became too small. In the same building, however, on a lower floor, a large six-room apartment became vacant. We moved there without any furniture." 22 The Brik-Mayakovsky apartment was one of the most active literary, linguistic and artistic centers in Russia during the period and after the Bolshevik revolution, despite Brik's unique capacity for "invisibility;" and it was he who "threw the ball into play," the guiding figure in this activity. Whenever he emerged from his study after having read a book or two or after having solved an intricate chess problem, the discussion often ceased and waited for new direction, or advice or illumination.23 Brik's formation of Opoyaz was a historical landmark in other ways. The Moscow Linguistic Circle was its direct offshoot. Brik was instrumental in forming it with Roman Jakobson, and was actively connected with it. Other linguistic societies, patterned on Opoyaz, slowly proliferated in universities and cities.24

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After the papers of the linguistic scholars were discussed and refined, Brik collected them for publication at his own expense. In 1916, the first issue of "A Collection of Essays on the Theory of Poetic Language" was published. A year later, Brik published another collection of Formalist essays, once again at his own expense. These publications marked a major reaction against a deeply ingrained "civic" approach in Russian literary criticism, which viewed literary works almost exclusively as an expression of social, political and biographical determinants. The aim of the essays was to formulate a specific set of principles or laws that govern the linguistic creation or production of poetic works. For these scholars, the essential ingredient in poetry was language, its role, structure, organization and function; and they pointed the way to new and pregnant possibilities in the theoretical study of literature and poetry in general. Their approach ultimately led to some of the most penetrating formalistic studies in the history of Russian literary criticism. Although the linguistic experimentation and play of the Futurists' poetry, in particular Mayakovsky's, served as the direct or indirect inspiration of these philological essays, there was notably not a single citation from, or reference to, Mayakovsky's poetry in either issue of "A Collection . . ." He was mentioned only in passing. The scholars, despite their admiration for his poetry, had not "reached" him. Brik's publication of the essays had important implications. His aim was to link Formalism to Futurism. He regarded the former as a theoretical offshoot of the latter. He believed that Futurist poetry functioned as a laboratory for additional linguistic studies for the Opoyaz scholars, because it provided the critical insights into the formal evolution of poetry and into the nature of poetic language. This also shaped his views in three important respects. First, a literary society was a symbiotic relationship between literary practice and theory, a view which he never abandoned and vigorously sought to achieve after 1917. His polemical struggle to realize his view is largely unintelligible without reference to his participation in the Opoyaz discussions. Secondly, given Brik's mental framework, which functioned in political-social categories and dialectics, it is a measure of his objectivity and sympathy to support unpopular causes, such as formalist studies. Finally, his own linguistic research shaped his view of the writer, artist and poet as a craftsman, an artificer, a producer who applies his skills to his particular craft, and later, to definite social and cultural problems. For Brik, the artist was the active, creative, independ-

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ent filter of the social and cultural imperatives of his age. In the history of literary criticism, Brik is one of the very few who successfully synthesized Formalism and Marxism. From 1916 to the end of 1917, Brik formed new connections with artists and writers so as to expand his literary society and to explore new avenues of formalistic criticism. He and Mayakovsky were associated with Maksim Gorky's journal and newspaper, Annals and New Life, and shared Gorky's opposition to the war. Gorky admired Mayakovsky as a poetic talent, but not as a personality. For Gorky, Mayakovsky's "hooligan" behavior flowed from his shyness and his "wild excesses" concealed his abnormal sensitivity and ambition.25 Gorky often wept when Mayakovsky read him his poetry, but Mayakovsky discovered that Gorky wept over everyone's poetry, regardless of quality.26 Gorky's efforts to lure Mayakovsky away from Brik were unsuccessful because he did not especially appreciate Brik's formalist literary orientation and circle and never considered either Formalism or Futurism significant as movements or movements at all. Hence Gorky's separation of Mayakovsky from Futurism and his irreverent attitude toward the Futurist poets Khlebnikov and Kruchonykh. As for Brik, Gorky's "proletarian" literary views were plainly incompatible with his own. He saw Gorky as a publishing rival and in competition with him in winning over writers and poets to their particular groups. But Brik did regard Gorky as a useful political ally and was quite willing to cooperate and maintain ties with him, although there was no possibility of any literary union with him. The events in the art world that followed the February 1917 revolution, which witnessed the collapse of the Russian autocracy and the rise of the new Provisional Government, and later the Kerensky Government, cast further light on Brik's and Mayakovsky's relationship to Gorky; and these events were dramatically reenacted after the Boshevik revolution in 1917. Many artists viewed the new political situation as an opportunity to gain greater artistic freedom. One of their paramount concerns was the nature and extent of governmental role in, and organization of, the art life of the country. The Provisional Government established in early March 1917 a Commission for the Preservation of Artistic Works. Its purpose was to prevent the loss and destruction of artistic monuments, the sale and removal of art works from collections, and to democratize art by making it accessible to the masses. Gorky played a key role in the Commission. In fact, it was he who suggested its creation to the

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Kerensky Government, which saw in Gorky a politically useful and prestigious ally in rallying support to itself. A large majority in the art world, however, believed that the new Commission merely masked the government's efforts to impose its control of art. A small influential, dynamic and creative group of "left" artists formed a loose union called "Freedom for Art", which vigorously opposed any form of governmental control. A Union of Art Workers, embracing all art groups and tendencies, was proposed to discuss the role and place of art under the new regime.27 The Union of Art Workers set a meeting for March 12. In preparation for it, two of the leading figures of the "left" artists, Mayakovsky and Nikolai Punin, one of the finest art critics of the time, tried to form some sixty artistic associations consisting of young artists to gain a majority voice at the March 12 meeting. Mayakovsky and Punin appealed to young artists at artistic workshops for their support of the "left" position at the meeting.28 Two days before the meeting, however, Mayakovsky and Punin were selected by the organizational bureau of the Union of Art Workers as full members, along with the poets Aleksandr Blok and Mikhail Kuzmin as candidate members. Interestingly, Gorky, despite his national and international fame and respect, was not selected as a member because of his connection with the Kerensky government, which was a source of great suspicion for artists of all persuasion.29 At the March 12 meeting, Mayakovsky was a passionate advocate of the freedom of art from any governmental control. The key remarks in his speech were: "Our cause—art—must include, in the future society, the right of free determination for all art workers. Now a Provisional Commission has been established consisting of twelve members. I think that even in preserving the artistic monuments, this Commission cannot be competent, since it has not been chosen on democratic principles. I respect all the people on the Commission; I respect Gorky very much; he has struggled for the freedom of art, but I am opposed to this defective organization. If there is artistic regulation, then only the well-known group 'World of Art' will be part of it. Benois is an adherent of a definite form of art that I find lacking in wholeness."30 Mayakovsky's ambivalence to Gorky is clear. The meeting was largely inconclusive. The "left" artists were unable to muster a majority vote. The fear of one artistic group gaining governmental control over other groups, as reflected in Mayakovsky's remarks, was allayed by the "left" artists. They proposed a resolution

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that met with the satisfaction of other artistic groups: that the Constituent Assembly of Art Workers convene after the end of the war to draw up the artistic constitution of the country. Finally, the artists also agreed "to welcome the Provisional government, the Soviet of Workers and Deputies and the Executive Committee of the State Duma." 31 Each artistic group was thus free of governmental control until the end of the war. Since the "left" artists did not muster a majority vote at the meeting, they decided to meet separately on March 17 for further discussion on aligning and increasing their forces. When they did meet, Mayakovsky had suddenly changed his position. He opposed the meeting and refused to recognize any "left" members except himself, Burliuk, and the artist Mikhail Larionov. Three days later, at another general meeting of "left" artists, Mayakovsky spoke against the federation of "left" artists. He now insisted on the necessity of an ideological struggle, the creation of a special organization and a new syndicate of Futurists with himself as its leader.32 Why this abrupt change in Mayakovsky's views? Mayakovsky and Brik felt that their group identity would be lost in a federation of artists; hence Mayakovsky's insistence on a new association of Futurists with himself as its head. More importantly, Gorky, deeply aware of Mayakovsky's wide influence and respect within the art and literary world, approached Mayakovsky and Brik to seek their group support of his position within the Kerensky government. Gorky realized that Mayakovsky's continued opposition could only undermine his own prestige and authority within the art world. An agreement was thus reached: Gorky agreed to publish Mayakovsky's poetry under the auspices of his publishing house "Sail" and in his forthcoming (April) newspaper "New Life" and to use Mayakovsky's artistic talents, in the form of popular prints, to ridicule or caricature the deposed autocracy. In return for this, Brik and Mayakovsky agreed to support Gorky. For Gorky, this agreement was not without its risks and consequences. The press in general and the more radical intelligentsia protested these publications of Mayakovsky's poetry by Gorky. The following letter to Gorky from a newspaper correspondent is not untypical of the common view of Futurist poetry at the time: "The publishing house 'Sail' plans to publish Mayakovsky's book, Simple as •Mooing. I think that this publication will be made not without your help. You are extremely kind. I know that. Allow me, however, frankly to express my views of Futurism. . . Some foreign learned psychiatrist

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(whose name I do not recall) has formulated (on the basis of his observations, studies and clinical statistics, etc.) a theory that the human brain (of everyone) will become in four-hundred or a maximum of five-hundred years a universal psycho-pathological mass, that is, it will become mad. Thus, the Futurists, indeed, 'those who will be' and their poetic works are now already satisfying, and not without reason, certain circles of the reading mass. . . Whether this is good or bad is not a question of literary criticism. . . I cannot help saying that, at any rate, a purely literary sympathy for Futurism is hardly a good or worthwhile cause, the more so since it is easy to be a Futurist. I tried writing: one can roll up hundreds of poems in a day. Another observation: if the end of a Futurist poem is put at the beginning and vice-versa, or done the very same way from the center, there will be no difference in reading it. The same holds true for the works of lunatics."33 For Mayakovsky and Brik, however, cooperation with Gorky was one way of achieving "official" recognition of the Futurists as a group. This also contained a large measure of appeal for Mayakovsky, in the sense that he, too, was "offically" recognized by an eminent publishing house. As Dinershtein suggests, there was another important consideration in the cooperation with Gorky. Since Gorky's Commission was of a temporary character, Mayakovsky and Brik thought that it was a tactical advantage to support Gorky so as to gain a much stronger political position for the Futurist group after the war, when a new constitution was to be written.34 In this way, Mayakovsky and Brik would have greater weight as "insiders". This agreement with Gorky, furthermore, did not in any way, as we shall see, prevent Mayakovsky and Brik from pressing their own independent efforts to rally artists, poets, musicians and critics to their group and thus further strengthen their position. As they saw it, the struggle for greater Futurist identity, leverage and power had to be waged with Gorky and without him. The available evidence clearly supports this view of an agreement between Gorky and Mayakovsky and Brik. Mayakovsky's activity within the Union of Art Workers ceased after April 8 until the Bolshevik revolution, which set the stage for a new round of political maneuvering within the art world. Significantly, according to the treasurer's records of Gorky's publishing house "Sail," on March 16, four days after the initial meeting of the Union of Art Workers' meeting, when Mayakovsky expressed his ambivalence toward Gorky, Mayakovsky received two-hundred fifty rubles for his popular prints. This was probably an advance payment. The payments, however,

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continued until August 18; and the total sum that he received for his artistic work was sixteen-hundred twenty-five rubles.35 On March 28, a most interesting document appeared in the Russian newspaper "The Russian Will." It was addressed to "workers' and soldiers' organizations and political parties" from a group of eminent figures from various fields: art, poetry, literature, theatre and music. Brik organized this group, which called itself, significantly, On to the Revolution. The group noted that its aim was to help political parties and other organizations "to propagate revolutionary ideas by means of art," to make their proclamations, placards and manifestoes cogent and expressive. The group also addressed writers and poets. Two telephone numbers were listed for further information. Other newspapers were asked to reprint the groups's document.36 The address is significant on a number of accounts. It reflects the group's view that an effective revolution had yet to come. The identification of an artistic revolution with a political revolution is implicit or, at any rate, the notion of democratizing art, of training young talent in all spheres of art, receives emphasis. The address was apparently another form of expanding the group's political base, of broadening its membership to include workers, soldiers and political parties. It is more than conceivable that Brik organized the group so as to compete directly with Proletkult (which will be discussed below), which was in the process of formation at the time with Gorky's and Lunacharsky's backing. After April 1917, the Bolsheviks began to infiltrate Gorky's newspaper "New Life," primarily with a view to shaping its political policies to revolutionary directions. In May 1917, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a Bolshevik, became the head of the "socialist-culture" section of the newspaper. After the Bolshevik revolution, Lunacharsky played a central role as Commissar of Enlightenment and determined the educational, and somewhat the cultural, policies of the Bolshevik regime. Lunacharsky was essentially an ambiguous, inconsistent, unrefined "Marxist" or proletarian theoretician of literature and art. He had a certain "taste" for innovation in them and supported it to a degree safely consistent with his own notions of proletarian culture and later with his delicate position as the Bolshevik cultural spokesman. His ideological orientation drew Brik's attention. A friendship developed between them. Lunacharsky occasionally visited the BrikMayakovsky apartment to discuss the role of literature and art in society with Brik's colleagues, especially the relationships between the

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political, economic and social structure of society and literary and artistic forms. Lunacharsky was impressed with Brik's grasp of the formal problems in the study of literary and artistic evolution, although he himself never really appreciated those problems. His primary concern was content in the arts. Lunacharsky also deeply admired Mayakovsky's poetic talent, and was a frequent guest at the BrikMayakovsky apartment.37 The friendship was fruitful and led to a joint venture. In July 1917, Brik and Lunacharsky conceived the idea of creating a new "leftsocialist" satirical journal, "The Wheelbarrow," which was to be published under Gorky's auspices. Several meetings were held to discuss the journal's format and orientation. According to Lunacharsky's letter to his wife, Brik, now affiliated with a small political group, the "social-democrats," was to be the journal's editor. The other members connected with the literary and art sections of the journal were, among others, Gorky and Mayakovsky, and Benois and Natan Altman (an avant-garde artist) respectively.38 The journal, however, was never published. The political events of early July precluded its publication. On July 3, 1917 large popular demonstrations threatened the stability of the Kerensky Government, which believed that they were inspired by the Bolsheviks. Political pressure may have been brought to bear on Gorky to remove the Bolsheviks from his own journal and newspaper for fear that they would eventually control them. Gorky perhaps shared this fear or suspicion that Lunacharsky and Brik would use the new journal for political satire on the Kerensky government. This suspicion was not without foundation: Brik and Mayakovsky were connected with the "social-democrats," which, although initially independent of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, gradually came to back the latter. Moreover, Lunacharsky, who was later arrested and imprisoned (in July 1917), and Trotsky were spokesmen for the "social-democratic" group at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917.39 In September 1917, there were two notable developments in relation to Gorky and Lunacharsky and the newspaper "New Life." The first was the organization of Proletkult—proletarian culture—in Russia by Aleksandr Bogdanov in collaboration with Gorky and Lunacharsky. The purpose of Proletkult was to train workers to develop and cultivate distinctly proletarian forms of poetry, literature, art and theatre that would reflect collective work processes and express the emotions, sensations, psyche, will and aspirations of the proletariat. Proletkult

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stressed the exclusive class character, nature and activity of art. It was not concerned with the existence of proletarian achievements in the arts because it intended to draw on the "bourgeois"culture of the past, especially the Russian classics of the nineteenth-century. This is how Lunacharsky and others perceived the development of proletarian culture; and they never came to grips with the inherent contradiction in the very notion of a proletarian culture based on "bourgeois" culture.40 Lunacharsky, for one, could extol "bourgeois" culture and alternately call it "decadent," as he often did with the Futurist poets and avantgarde artists. Politically, Proletkult repudiated any formal ties with the Bolshevik Party, and later its government, although it naturally expected institutionalization from it as the only valid cultural organization in a communist society. This indeed happened after the Bolshevik revolution, when Lunacharsky granted subsidies and status to Proletkult as a politically independent cultural organization. Proletkult thus considered itself the cultural "government" or arm of Bolshevism, independent of its political and economic organs, which, it believed, contained bourgeois elements that would corrupt the purity of its class character. One of the key officials of Proletkult, Pavel LebedevPolyansky, did not regard the Soviet regime as exclusively proletarian and even believed that "Proletkult had the right to control the Soviet government and to intervene in its work."41 Bogdanov und Lunacharsky even set up their own Central Committee to direct Proletkult's activities, by analogy with the Central Committee of the Comunist party. There was one obstacle, however, that Proletkult could not and never did overcome: Lenin and Trotsky opposed its political position, its claim of autonomy and independence of Party control and direction, although they encouraged Proletkult as a cultural organization compatible with Bolshevik aspirations. Moreover, Lenin and Trotsky never believed in the immediate creation of a "proletarian" culture; that was a matter of the distant communist future. Lunacharsky, however, despite their opposition, tended to assert after October 1917 Proletkult's political independence and warmly supported it; and it must have been a crushing blow for him to bring Proletkult under the control of his own Commissariat in 1921 on Lenin's orders.42 Obviously, Lunacharsky's personal views on Proletkult conflicted with his political position as the Bolshevik spokesman on cultural affairs.43 The second development concerned the Bolsheviks' intention to withdraw their members from Gorky's newspaper because of its wavering, inconsistent stance on revolutionary necessity. This did not hap-

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pen, partly due to Lunacharsky's desire to remain in the newspaper. He believed that he could use "New Life" to win over writers, poets and other artists to Proletkult. A new attempt was made later to persuade Gorky to back the slate of Bolshevik candidates for the Constituent Assembly, but Gorky flatly refused.44 After October 5, the Bolsheviks abandoned all hope of Gorky's political backing in anticipation of a revolutionary seizure of power, which came about on October 25, 1917. One of the basic concerns of the new Bolshevik regime was to extend rapid control of the political, military and industrial organization of the country. Cultural development received less priority because it was not essential to the survival of the revolution. The ultimate aim of the Bolsheviks was to win the collaboration and acceptance of as many qualified personnel as possible, regardless of their ideological convictions, so as to preserve a measure of continuity with the past and thus legitimize Bolshevik rule. Ideological orthodoxy was largely sacrificed until the triumph of the revolution. These notions were universally applicable. A week after the Bolshevik revolution, broad appeals were made to all cultural figures to discuss with the new regime ways of shaping the artistic life of the country. About six eminent figures responded: Aleksandr Blok, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Aleksandr Benois (who apparently defected from Gorky's newspaper), the Proletkult artist and Central Committee member Larisa Reisner, the avant-garde artist Altman and Mayakovsky. One of the key officials of the new regime, a Presidium member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Boris Malkin, was responsible for initiating the appeals.45 Malkin greeted and talked with these figures and struck up a friendship with Mayakovsky, and shortly after with the Briks. It is Malkin who was later to play a key role in cooperating with Brik and Mayakovsky when they rose to positions of authority. Malkin also became an ardent votary and associate of the Russian Futurist movement throughout the 1920's. In effect, Malkin was the Futurists' direct link to the Bolshevik political hierarchy; and his efforts to keep the Futurist movement alive are quite substantial. This initial meeting, however, never went beyond the realm of general discussion. It vividly demonstrates the mass boycott of the artistic world. The new regime lacked any organizational structure and was hardly capable of defining the contours of any artistic policy. The artistic world simply refused to cooperate by ignoring the Bolshevik

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appeals; it cherished the freedom and autonomy that it had attained in March 1917 and naturally feared the intrusion of the state in art. What is more, a large majority of artists strongly believed that the revolution would not survive. Gorky's sharp attacks on the Bolshevik regime and Lunacharsky, the new Commissar of Enlightenment, added strength to their belief. Gorky's unmitigated hostility effectively excluded him from any form of participation, from the standpoint of the Bolsheviks, in the art and literary life of the country at the moment. Gorky's support was vital as a rallying force, and its lack frustrated Lunacharsky's efforts to organize the artistic world. Lunacharsky's subsequent appeals to the art world drew silence. He now decided to engage Punin and Brik as his mediators with the Union of Art Workers. At a meeting of the Union on November 12, Punin conveyed Lunacharsky's proposal for "state supervision of the artistic life of the country," in which the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies and the Union would participate on an equal basis.46 The Union categorically rejected the proposal as a politicization and proletarianization of art. It asserted its exclusive right to manage the artistic affairs of the country. Even Brik, Mayakovsky and Punin voted against Lunacharsky's proposal. Several days later, Lunacharsky tried a new approach that had a certain precedent in the February revolution. Brik became the instrument of this approach. He told the Union of Lunacharsky's desire to establish a council for the protection of art treasures, museums and monuments that were once again being threatened by the revolutionary upheaval. The new council was to consist of fifteen members of political organizations and fifteen members of the Union of Art Workers. This idea was rejected almost unanimously, with Mayakovsky abstaining.47 After this meeting, however, Aleksandr Benois and Count V. Zubov met privately with Lunacharsky to take up his proposal for a commission to protect the art treasures and museums. Mayakovsky was present at the meeting; and, after some bitter words with Lunacharsky, he stormed out of his office convinced that Lunacharsky was leaning heavily toward the academic and conservative artists who would eventually be given, he believed then, political power to run the art life of the country without the participation or survival of the "left" artists. For Mayakovsky, Lunacharsky's choice of Benois and Zubov was tantamount to a personal insult, to a contemptuous lack of recognition of his talents in service of the revolution. Brik made reference to this

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meeting later: "It was not only the 'left' artists who began to collaborate with the Soviet leadership. A. Benois and P. Zubov were also included; they saw in the Soviet regime the 'iron rule' that could protect the cultural treasures and artistic monuments of the past. Mayakovsky's encounter with his traditional enemies in the office of the revolutionary commissar completely bewildered him. His passionate futurist proposals met a sharp rebuff from the 'defenders of the old junk.' And the revolutionary commissar Lunacharsky listened more attentively to Benois' advice about the organization of museums than to Mayakovsky's 'arch-revolutionary' attacks."48 Punin points out that Mayakovsky's clashes with Lunacharsky at a meeting, or in a journal, or in "New Life" could serve as an explanation for "Mayakovsky's and Brik's belated approach to the October revolution."49 Punin is undoubtedly right, however simplified his viewpoint. To assert, as some Soviet scholars do, that Mayakovsky (and Brik) misunderstood the tasks of the Soviet regime in protecting the art treasures as an explanation of his belated approach is quite misleading and irrelevant to the issue at hand.50 The converse is much closer to the truth. Mayakovsky and Brik were ready to serve the new regime, consistent with their views on the autonomy of art; but so long as Lunacharsky tended to insist on state control or supervision of the arts, no compromise on the role of the artists, especially the "left" artists, was possible. In other words, Lunacharsky's actions, views and choices prevented Mayakovsky and Brik from cooperation with, and participation in, the new regime. They had no place in the scheme of things, and one critical example will point this out. In the middle of November, Mayakovsky and Brik approached Lunacharsky about setting up a publishing house The Association of Socialist Art, with the financial support of Lunacharsky's Commissariat.51 Lunacharsky refused to support the publishing venture because it would have competed with Proletkult, which he was actively promoting and subsidizing at the time. This refusal stemmed from "personal" considerations. From the standpoint of his political position as the cultural Commissar, Lunacharsky wanted to draw the bourgeois artists into the governmental organization of the arts; and granting Mayakovsky and Brik subsidies for their publishing house would have hampered his efforts, if not make them impossible. If he had granted subsidies to them, it would have been difficult to deny subsidies to other artistic groups. Although Mayakovsky (and Brik) remained pro-Bolshevik political-

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ly and could not find a place in the new regime, he had to pursue his poetic and promotional activities outside of Lunacharsky's Commissariat to preserve Futurist identity and solidarity. In early December, Mayakovsky left Petrograd to work in Moscow for a private film company, Neptune. Mayakovsky was to remain in Moscow until late June 1918, when, significantly, the Futurists rose to political power in the Department of Fine Arts (IZO) under Lunacharsky's Commissariat. He also joined his Futurist colleagues Vasily Kamensky and David Burliuk in the Poets' Cafe, which Kamensky founded in late November 1917.52 As we shall see, Mayakovsky's activities in Moscow were not exactly of a fortuitous character, but apparently part of conscious strategy that he and Brik worked out to rally artists, poets and writers around the Futurist banner and to compete directly with Proletkult for a cultural role in the new regime in both Moscow and Petrograd. In Moscow, poets of all persuasions used cafes for public readings of their poetry because of the paper shortage and the lack of literary publishing houses and journals at the time. Eventually, musicians, artists, actors and singers also performed in these cafes. The idea spread rapidly. Cafes multiplied and saved many poets and artists from starvation, for they provided them with means of support. For the Futurist poets, this activity was also a way of realizing their view of merging art and life. As Mayakovsky found his activities in the Poets' Cafe both congenial and profitable, Brik became embroiled in an ideological battle with Lunacharsky and the new regime over its cultural policies. Before and after the revolution, Lunacharsky tried unsuccessfully to absorb Brik's "On to the Revolution" group into Proletkult so as to organize and direct its literary training centers. Brik later did give lectures on poetry and literature to proletarian groups, but not in any formal connection with Proletkult. Lunacharsky also invited Brik in mid-October and in November to the Proletkult conferences and meetings of its central committee.53 Brik came away utterly convinced that the literary and exclusive class orientation of Proletkult was absurdly futile and doomed to bankruptcy. Again the problem of Futurist identity was paramount in his mind. He realized that he and his "bourgeois" colleagues would find no viable place in Proletkult, despite ideological differences. For Brik, the notion of proletarian class origin was not necessarily tied to the expression of proletarian class ideology, as he was to argue later concerning Marx and Engels who, as members of the

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bourgeoisie, expressed the ideology of the proletariat. More importantly, Brik saw class and ideology as an irrelevant issue in artistic terms: art as a whole was a function of skills, devices, craftsmanship, not of class or ideology. Brik sensed that Lunacharsky's view of state control of the arts for bourgeois members under his own Commissariat was a pretext for Proletkult's bid for cultural monopoly, either to the exclusion of bourgeois artists or Proletkult's imposition of its proletarian ideology on them as a condition of existence. If Lunacharsky insisted on Proletkult's political independence of the Soviet regime and of his own Commissariat, he had, at any rate, to be consistent in according the same to bourgeois artists. In late November, however, informed sources say that either Lunacharsky or Boris Malkin attempted to soften Brik's hostility to the regime and Proletkult by selecting him as a Bolshevik member of the Petrograd city council. The revelation surprised Brik, who was without political affiliation after the revolution; and it quickly prompted him to write a letter to Gorky's newspaper to expound his views on the political and cultural trends of the moment. As far as Gorky was concerned, Brik's letter contained sufficient criticism of the Bolsheviks for publication. Brik wrote: One of my friends has told me that I have been chosen as a member of the new city council as a Bolshevik. For me this was totally unexpected. No one asked for my permission and I gave it to no one. I am not a politician, nor do I belong to any party. I am a cultural worker. I therefore do not know whether the Bolsheviks are carrying out good policies. The arrests of the dissidents, the violence on the spoken word, on the press and other manifestations of physical violence are not the distinctive characteristic of the Bolsheviks. Every regime acts similarly: in both autocratic Russia and in Liberal England, and in Democratic France. The Cadets behaved similarly after the third and fourth of July, and so did Kerensky plan to act on the eve of October 25. The cultural program of the Bolsheviks, however, is impossible. I am convinced of this after witnessing the conference of the proletarian cultural-educational organizations. If they are allowed freely to carry on in this sphere, then something will turn out that has nothing in common with culture. I therefore consider any sabotage, any repudiation of active cultural work a crime

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before culture and the people. To sit and wait while everything takes shape of itself is the honored role of the philistine. Only hopelessly blind men can make the triumph of culture a victory of counter-revolution. The only true way is the steadfast pursuit of one's own cultural way, to be everywhere where culture is imperiled, by staunchly defending it from any, including Bolshevik, vandalism. In expressing this thought I do not decline my unexpected membership in the Bolshevik party. I state, however, that I do not belong to the Bolshevik party, am not subject to any party discipline and take no part in political activities. The cultural program of the Bolsheviks, in so far as it was expressed in the work of the Central Committee of the proletarian cultural-educational organization, is completely unacceptable to me. I consider it necessary to struggle precisely against that program with special energy. If the Bolsheviks do not find my position acceptable, then please exclude my name from the membership list.54 Brik's letter is striking in its compression, subtlety and suggestion. It was bound to endear Brik to the art world because it took the Bolsheviks, i. e. Lunacharsky, to task for delaying or suspending the organization of the art life of the country and reasserted the independence of art of state control. The letter also implies that Lunacharsky was encouraging the free and independent development of Proletkult at the expense of other non-proletarian cultural figures and groups, whose artistic independence and principles deserved similar encouragement. Perhaps the intransigence of the non-proletarian artists on the vital issue of independence of state control led Lunacharsky to suspend his efforts to organize the arts. One might say that Brik himself was bidding for some role in the new regime for Opoyaz and the Futurists. In fact, Brik's views were consonant with those of Lenin and Trotsky, who never shared Proletkult's impractical notions and who encouraged the relatively free development and competition of all cultural groups as a necessary prelude to the creation of a proletarian culture. This is apparently what Brik meant in his remark that the "only true way is the steadfast pursuit of one's own cultural way . . . " Despite the suggestion of compromise and cooperation with the Bolsheviks, Brik preserved his intellectual integrity. Lunacharsky either had to accept Brik and his colleagues on their own terms or risk their

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opposition to the regime's cultural policies. The idea ultimately dawned on Lunacharsky that without the bourgeois avant-garde artists, the cultural program and organization of the country could not be successful, precisely because they were the most creative, dynamic and talented artistic group at the time. Another significant event in late December tended to confirm Brik's suspicion that Proletkult was bidding for cultural monopoly. A radical official of both Proletkult and Lunacharsky's own Commissariat, Pavel Lebedev-Polyansky, announced that the "Journal of the Ministry of People's Enlightenment," would be renamed "People's Education" and become a "socialist organ," a "social-political, pedagogical and scientific" journal ostensibly of Proletkult. Brik wrote another letter to "New Life" that this newly renamed journal would most likely resemble its predecessor, another government publication that would not publish materials that were "contrary to the cultural program of those who managed it." To this extent, the Bolsheviks were preserving an old bureaucratic system in which "living ideas were doomed as before to remain outside the dust jackets of an organ published at public expense." Brik went on to say that the Bolsheviks, by making the journal a party publication, were "acting contrary to the basic slogan of a socialist and common-democratic program—the freedom of spiritual self-determination." Brik called for a radical change in the whole atmosphere, whereby any organization or group would be given the opportunity to publish its scientific, educational articles, including its resolutions, reports, proceedings, brief accounts of its activities, plans and other relevant information. As Brik put it, the editorial function of the journal was to systematize and regulate materials sent to it. The journal had to serve as a forum for the exchange of views between scholars and educational associations. In this way, the journal would serve as a medium of all diverse scientific, educational and artistic activity in the country, for it would bring to light the true purpose of the people's regime: to respond to the spiritual, independent, spontaneous activity of the people, and not "impose from above a specific, narrow party cultural program."55 Throughout his life, Brik adhered to this basic idea of a society in which cultural groups would freely develop and inter-act. In early January 1918, Brik formed a loose organization of artists and writers, The Art of the Young (Imo - Iskusstvo molodykh). Brik perhaps chose that name so as not to offend the political sensitivities of the Bolsheviks and the artistic world. In any case, Brik no longer used

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the name "The Association of Socialist Art" as Mayakovsky was to do in Moscow. In fact, Mayakovsky still believed in late December 1917 that Brik was still continuing his efforts to set up a publishing house under that imprint. Mayakovsky's letters to the Briks indicate that he was not abreast of Brik's activities in Petrograd because he constantly asked the Briks to write to him.56 But Brik's and Mayakovsky's purposes in both Moscow and Petrograd were identical. Brik formed The Art of the Young to promote the activities of the "left" artists and writers, to hold art exhibits and literary readings and discussions. He rented a room in Petrograd which became the center of artistic and literary activities. Brik had hoped that art exhibits would help support artists, but as he noted, only "the impecunious admirers of 'extreme left' art came to the exhibits."57 Nevertheless, the artistic and literary organization prevailed until it gained its own publishing house under Lunacharsky's auspices in July 1918. In Moscow, however, Mayakovsky was much more successful than Brik. In late February 1918, Mayakovsky managed to publish, with Burliuk's and Kamensky's financial help, two of his own works in uncensored versions: "The Cloud in Trousers" and "Man." Both these works were published under the imprint of The Association of Socialist Art, and indicated Petrograd as the place of publication, although they were actually published in Moscow. A month later, Mayakovsky, Burliuk and Kamensky published the first and only issue of "The Futurists' Newspaper." It contained, among other things, "A Decree on the Democratization of Art" and Mayakovsky's "Open Letter to Workers." The first piece called for a mass celebration and expression of creative activity to decorate the streets and squares with art. The "decree" exhorted writers and poets to express the "free word" of their creative personalities on buildings, fences, roofs, streets, squares, automobiles and streetcars—an idea that also appealed to Lenin.58 On the day of the newspaper's publication, Burliuk himself exhibited his paintings in the streets, while Mayakovsky and Kamensky pasted copies of their newspaper on buildings around Moscow. One section of the newspaper announced that the "Flying Federation of Futurists, orators, poets, painters" would give, free of charge, poetry readings and art exhibits to "all workers' audiences that thirst for revolutionary art." There was also this interesting note, perhaps written by Mayakovsky, on the effect of the existing artistic monuments: "As before, the monuments that were erected to generals, princes, czars' mistresses, czarinas' lovers stand on

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the throats of the young streets like a heavy, dirty foot." In his "Open Letter...," Mayakovsky equated the political revolution with the Futurist revolution of new literary and artistic forms. He remarked that "only the spirit of the revolution will rid us of the rags of the old art," which was useful in "Schools and universities for the study of geography, the daily hum-drum [byt] and history.. ," 59 Like Brik, Mayakovsky expressed the overwhelming, consuming passion of the avant-garde artists of the time: that a spiritually creative revolution had to attend the political revolution in the transformation of daily life. Brik and Mayakovsky believed that new and relevant artistic forms could only arise from the rejection — and for some, the destruction—of the art and literature of the "bourgeoisie," which had no reference to their time. Related to this belief was their view that art and literature could no longer be confined exclusively to the realm of "artistic" illusion, imagination and isolation, but that they had to be applied then to the very reconstruction and transformation of society as a result of the Bolshevik revolution. Just as the political revolution was ranged against "bourgeois" society, so, too, they believed, was the artistic revolution ranged against "bourgeois" art. The Bolshevik revolution's promise of a political, social and economic transformation of society justified, they believed, the search and creation of new artistic forms and modes of work that would reflect the new revolutionary content. Mayakovsky expressed this Utopian and chiliastic view shortly after the February 1917 revolution: Citizens! Today a thousand years of 'Former Times' have collapsed. Today the foundation of worlds is being reexamined. Today we will transform life anew down to the last button on our clothing. Citizens! This is the first day of the workers' deluge. We are coming to the rescue of this confused world. Let the crowds hammer the clatter of their feet into the heavens. Let the fleets assist the fury with their sirens.60 The preceding events—Brik's letter in "New Life" and the Futurists' activities in the Poets' Cafe—were not without effect on Lunacharsky. On January 29, 1918 Lunacharsky established the Section of Fine Arts

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(IZO), but only a very small group of artists staffed it. For about six months the Section concerned itself "almost wholly with its organization and the organization of, and assistance to, parallel sections of palaces and museums."61 Thus the Section had no ideological direction, and the overwhelming majority of the art world had no part in its organizational work. Lunacharsky was now willing to compromise and negotiate with the Union of Art Workers to join in the regime's efforts to organize and sustain the art life of the country. He assured the Union that the regime would pursue a policy of strict neutrality towards all art groups and would favor their free development, even with financial support. The organization of the arts became an increasingly acute problem because many artists were on the verge of starvation; and the Bolshevik regime had become the major patron of the arts, in the sense that it was an institution that could effectively provide artists with financial support. Lenin, as we shall see, was conscious of this problem. But the Union, especially those members of the Academy of Arts, refused to cooperate or negotiate. The Academy's influence on the art world was considerable; its demands for the control of the whole cultural life of the country, independent of the Bolshevik regime, smacked of cultural sabotage to Lunacharsky. He was profoundly aware of the genuine fears of many pro-Bolshevik and "left" artists that the Academy of Arts, which functioned as a governmental body under the Russian autocracy since the 18th century, was oriented towards "official," "academic" and "realistic" art and would not pursue a policy of neutrality, thus discriminating against them.62 Before any modus operandi could be reached, Lunacharsky had to abolish the Academy so as to replace it with his own Section of Fine Arts. This happened on April 12, 1918 by official decree with Lenin's personal signature.63 Lunacharsky now felt that he was in a more advantageous position to negotiate with the art world. The Academy of Arts, however, responded with the threat to "declare war" if it did not have "the functions of a governmental organ."64 The abolition of the Academy made no fundamental change in the attitude of the art world towards state organization of the arts, despite Lunacharsky's repeated assurances of neutrality and autonomy. This can be seen in a conference of artists that Lunacharsky himself convened around the middle of April 1918 to discuss cooperation of the arts. Approximately two-thirds of the artists refused to cooperate with Lunacharsky.65

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Lunacharsky, however, was also working in other directions; and an event on April 12, 1918 apparently points to a reconciliation between him and Mayakovsky. Lunacharsky happened to be a guest at the Futurists' Poets' Cafe. Mayakovsky, aware of his presence, took the floor to remark that, although the Futurists were "complicating art," they were also "striving to democratize it." He then directed his remarks to Lunacharsky to add that the art of the future undoubtedly belonged to Futurism, an art that "can be supported by our respected guest—The People's Commissar for Enlightenment, Ailatoly Lunacharsky." Lunacharsky then rose to the platform to respond. He criticized the flamboyant, noisy Futurist antics, the Futurist contempt for the Russian classics. However anti-bourgeois the Futurist actions seemed to be, Lunacharsky added, they were actually bourgeois in content and nature. Then, in a conciliatory tone, Lunacharsky observed that "Mayakovsky's sincerity could attract the masses and give futurism a tinge of national character /narodnost/.,,6é Lunacharsky's efforts to negotiate with the art world and to seek some reconciliation with Mayakovsky apparently drew special urgency from a highly significant discussion between Lunacharsky and Lenin in early 1918; it clearly demonstrates the "creative" orientation of Lenin's revolutionary thought, his active involvement in matters of art, and his awareness of the grim, destitute plight of artists at the time. Lenin noted that many artists were "living in great poverty" and could provide some service to the state. He then singled out Tommaso Campanella's "The City of the Sun"—Lenin actually referred to it as "The State of the Sun" —as the Utopian blueprint for the artistic reconstruction of cities, especially Moscow and Petrograd. As Lenin put it, Campanella's description of the frescos on the walls of his "fantastic socialist city" was a form of historical and scientific education that could breed new generations in the spirit of patriotism and communism. Lenin added that this idea "could be adopted by us and realized immediately." Furthermore, Lenin pointed out that Lunacharsky had to "organize the artistic forces." Since the Russian climate was unsuitable for frescos, sculptors, poets and writers had to be enlisted to erect monuments to prominent revolutionary and cultural figures and display expressive and significant inscriptions of the basic principles and slogans of Marxism on buildings. The erection of these monuments also entailed the removal of Czarist monuments, as the Futurists had suggested. Lenin called this project "monumental propaganda" in the cause of the revolution. He observed that the unveiling

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of monuments held particular importance as an "act of propaganda, a minor celebration," when notable figures would give speeches in relating the monuments to revolutionary and cultural figures to "our revolution and its tasks."67 Lenin's ideas found concrete expression in a decree on April 12, 1918, in which the Section of Fine Arts, among other state bodies, was called upon to "mobilize artistic forces and organize broad competition in the production of projects of monuments to signify the great days of the Russian Socialist Revolution." This decree coincided with another decree on April 12, which abolished, as noted, the Academy of Arts so as to attract the art world to the regime's artistic projects. The Section of Fine Arts was also responsible for decorating cities with inscriptions and emblems reflective of the ideas and feelings of the revolution.68 Lenin's projects captivated Lunacharsky, to the extent that they contained the notion of a "socialist commission" to artists. But since his efforts to draw the support of a large number of artists to the Section's work and to fulfill Lenin's projects were unsuccessful, Lunacharsky was compelled to observe later that "there were no means for this, and my promises to artists of how much they would gain once they shifted from work in the private market to the cultural work of the state were, naturally, hanging in mid-air." The project on erecting monuments was thus delayed until July 1918; the decoration of the two capital cities for the May Day celebration never came off, which provoked Lenin to send a telegram to Lunacharsky: "I am astonished and aqgered by your lack of work... in preparing good quotations and inscriptions on public buildings in Petrograd and Moscow."69 There is another important episode that deserves mention. By the summer of 1918, Gorky gradually reconciled himself to the Bolshevik revolution. A special meeting was held in his apartment between Lunacharsky and a group of conservative artists to discuss an agreement concerning the organization of the Section of Fine Arts. According to Lunacharsky's own account of this meeting, he was presented with a list of "chosen members" (izbrannye) who were willing to work with him, but not with his aides. As Lunacharsky put it, this list of artists, apparently composed of members of the Academy of Arts, was analogous to a "tortoise shell that planned to have art sit out all the unpleasant aspects which threatened it from the 'barbarous revolution'." Lunacharsky added:

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All this for me, as the representative of the Soviet regime, was absolutely unacceptable. In the realm of art, it was necessary above all to destroy the remnants of the very essence of czarist institutions like the Academy of Arts. It was necessary to liberate the school from the old 'notable figures.' Freedom of movement had to be given on equal principles to all schools. In particular, one had to find the sympathy of youth once its ranks had been filled first and foremost from the proletariat and the semiproletariat. . . Granting power to any professional union of artists, to any artistic associations in general, to any artistic establishment, would have meant the failure of Soviet policy in the realm of art and a capitulation in the defense of old customs. Even relatively left artists would have been frightened at the time by the necessity of struggling with the almost age-old foundations of artistic life. In this regard, a great deal of fervor, faith, and, perhaps, youthful zeal were needed. My old friend, Comrade D. P. Shterenberg, completely agreed with this program. He associated himself with the Soviet regime, a Left Bundist, an outstanding artist, widely known to the Russian art world in Paris, a most honorable man, who knew how to be authoritative as well, whenever necessary.70 Lunacharsky's observations graphically reveal that no compromise was possible with the Union and Academy leaders, whose aims were antithetical to the spirit of the revolution as Lunacharsky saw it. He thus faced two alternatives: to extend the political revolution to the artistic world by turning to the avant-garde artists in defiance of the Union and Academy leaders, or to face the real prospect of artistic stagnation or paralysis of the country and opposition from pro-Bolshevik quarters, e. g. the avant-garde itself. Either alternative was destined to arouse resistence to the regime and stir bitter and heated conflicts and controversies. This is very often the inevitable consequence that flows from fundamental political change. Both politically and personally, Lunacharsky had a large stake in the success of the regime's cultural policies; he could not risk the claim that the revolution was destroying the art life of the country when the destructive passion of the Bolshevik revolution contained, to paraphrase Bakunin, a creative passion as well—the dual passion that the avant-garde artists so abundantly possessed and so eagerly desired to express. This complex set of political and personal circumstances and alternatives ultimately com-

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pelled Lunacharsky to turn to the avant-garde artists. They organized, administered and guided the Section of Fine Arts to an artistic revolution of such scope and dimensions that it went far beyond Lunacharsky's and the regime's expectations and has known no historical parallel. In organizing the Section of Fine Arts, David Shterenberg played a considerable role. Shterenberg was an avant-garde who lived in the Paris art world before the revolution. After the revolution, he returned from emigration to Petrograd and renewed his friendship with Lunacharsky, who sought his advice on artistic matters. Shterenberg was also a frequent visitor at Brik's Art of the Young literary and artistic discussions which were not unlike those in Paris. Shterenberg's close association with, and admiration for, the Briks at the time can perhaps be best seen in the fact that, in the latter half of 1918, he lived in the Brik-Mayakovsky apartment. In the middle of June 1918, Lunacharsky instructed Shterenberg to discuss with Brik and Punin his terms for the planning and direction of the Section of Fine Arts. Lunacharsky's major terms were: 1) that all art movements and trends be given the opportunity to develop freely; 2) that a set of artistic projects connected with propagandizing the revolution and the erection of monuments to revolutionary figures be undertaken as quickly as possible in accordance with Lenin's wishes; 3) that there be a general democratization of art in the form of free art exhibits and lectures to the masses and the creation of art schools in which all art trends would be represented; 4) that the Section express an artistic theory consistent with the above terms and with the spirit of the revolution as a whole. Brik and Punin agreed with these terms. Lunacharsky's recollection of this episode is of high interest: "Comrade Shterenberg, himself an absolute modernist, found in his [!] work support almost exclusively among the left figures. The talented publicists and theoreticians of artistic revolution, like Brik and Punin, the outstanding representatives of the left, Tatlin, Malevich, Altman.. . formed a group that was the fulcrum of our [!] work in the realm of art."71 Brik, however, included another condition that he considered integral to the Section's work: that the Section be given a publishing house and a newspaper so that it could effectively propagate its revolutionary artistic aims. At the time, Brik did not specifically mention the nature of the publications or even the imprint of the publishing house, although he himself knew what he had in view: the publications of the works of the "Art of the Young" circle, under that imprint.

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A subsequent meeting was held in early July 1918 in which Brik, Punin, Mayakovsky, Lunacharsky, Shterenburg and Malkin were present. Malkin represented the regime on publishing matters and, in November 1918, became the head of the Central Press (Tsentropechat) agency of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for distributing propaganda materials in the revolutionary cause. At the meeting, the group reached a general accord on the ideological direction of the Section according to Lunacharsky's terms. Brik, Punin, Altman, Kandinsky, among others, were appointed commissars of art and formed the executive committee (kollegiya) of the Section of Fine Arts under Shterenburg, who was already appointed head of the Section in early 1918. The participation of other artists and critics in the Section's work was also discussed, and they included some of the most eminent figures of the time: Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Kushner, Chagall, Puni, Filonov, Stepanova, Popova, Gabo, the Stenberg brothers, among many others. Lunacharsky emphasized the extreme urgency of the Section's fulfillment of Lenin's project on erecting monuments to revolutionary and cultural figures and on decorating Moscow and Petrograd with appropriate slogans and inscriptions. The Section resolved this matter administratively on July 17, 1918.72 It is hard to conceive that Lenin was not informed of this course of events and of these general agreements, since Lunacharsky and particularly Malkin were in direct and frequent contact with Lenin. Brik's view of the necessity of a publishing house for the publication of "revolutionary" literature and a newspaper (which came to be the extremely controversial "The Art of the Commune") for the Section met with Lunacharsky's and Malkin's approval. But an agreement was not reached on the publishing house until July 27, 1918, when Brik presented an organizational plan and the scope and terms of the publishing venture. He submitted a list of ten titles for projected publication, which included two books on the theory and practice of Futurism as a revolutionary movement, one book on Formalist literary theory, one book on literature from 1909 to 1919, four books of poetry by Mayakovsky, Kamensky, Khlebnikov, and Pasternak respectively, one book called "The Will of Millions," and finally one book on poetry with artistic illustrations.73 Interestingly, the publishing house came to be called The Art of the Young, and the members associated with it were essentially those who belonged to Brik's original Opoyaz group, a fusion of Futurist poets and Formalist critics. Brik, Mayakovsky and Shklovsky were the heads

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of the publishing concern; Roman Jakobson was its Secretary; the others were the poets Nikolai Aseev, David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Aleksandr Kruchonykh, Viktor Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak, and the Formalist critics Boris Kushner, Evgeny Polivanov, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Lev Yakubinsky. Brik defined the publishing concern as "an association of left writers that creates, publishes and propagandizes books in a revolutionary way that has broken with all established literary traditions. . ." 74 The salient terms of the contract stipulated the publication of twelve books in a one-year period, complete autonomy in editorial matters and payment of honorariums to the authors of the article and books only after they were sold and after receipts were returned. But the prospect of prolonged delay in receiving honorariums during the revolutionary turmoil was impractical to the group, which refused to submit their works for publication until payment was made in advance.75 Later a new agreement was reached to that effect, and involved the unique services of the Futurist votary, Boris Malkin. As a high Party official and the head of Central Press, Malkin's key role consisted in purchasing enough copies of the publications of "The Art of the Young" so as to cover all typographical expenses and honorariums for the authors. He then distributed these books to various regions of the country. One Proletkult newspaper in the Don region noted that the Central Press, as an agency of the All-Russian Executive Committee, had distributed "a large quantity of Futurist literature" in the region that was responsible for the popularity of the Futurists, a popularity that they themselves could not gain.76 What appears to make Malkin's role even more crucial in the Futurist popularity is that in 1919 Mayakovsky contracted personally with Malkin for the publication of additional editions of his "War and the Universe" and "Mystery-Bouffe" on the basis of increased demand for them.77 What is more, Malkin's distribution of the Futurist publications was in effect a state enterprise and had the character of "official" recognition of Futurists and Formalists. Malkin apparently realized that his propagation of Futurism involved some measure of political risk to himself, especially since Brik, as the head of The Art of the Young and the "real" head of the Section of Fine Arts, was not a Party member and had questionable background in terms of his political loyalty to the Bolshevik regime. In late 1918, Malkin therefore sought to cover himself politically, and the Futurists as well. That Malkin believed that the Futurists could establish a viable

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foothold within the Soviet regime is worthy of consideration, or is certainly not inconceivable. At any rate, Malkin persuaded Brik that the Futurist cause could be advanced with less political risk or with greater Party favor if he and other Futurists demonstrated their loyalty to the Party by joining it. Simultaneously, Malkin also suggested that Brik, as a student of law, offer his services to the Cheka, which then critically needed specialists in juridical and judicial procedures to train Chekists for prosecuting cases in the revolutionary tribunals. Brik agreed, including Boris Kushner, and joined the Party and the Cheka. Brik's services to the latter consisted of providing lectures to Chekists and of drawing up guidelines on those procedures. Beyond this, the scope of Brik's work in the Cheka can perhaps never be determined. What can safely be determined, however, is that Brik was excluded from the Party and the Cheka in late 1921 because of his "bourgeois origins" and never rejoined them. Despite this, Brik's "permanent" connection with the Cheka had taken firm root in the minds of many; and talk of his continued connection with the Cheka persisted because the acquaintances that he and Mayakovsky had made with Chekists during the revolutionary years occasionally visited their apartment after 1921, primarily for "cultural" purposes. To return to The Art of the Young: What was the ultimate scope of its publications? However small the number of individual books published under that imprint, the total number of copies of each book is quite impressive, as the following list will indicate:78 1. The Unsifted Word: A Revolutionary Anthology of Futurists (Petrograd, 1918) 2. V. Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe (Petrograd, 1918) 3. V. Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe (2nd ed., Petrograd, 1919) 4. V. Mayakovsky, War and the Universe (2nd ed., Petrograd, 1919) 5. Poetics: A Collection of Essays on the Theory of Poetic Language (Petrograd, 1919) 6. V. Mayakovsky, Complete Works (Petrograd, 1919) Total

5 000 copies 5 000 copies 16 000 copies 24 000 copies 10 000 copies 10 000 copies 70 000 copies

There is one notable feature of the first book that was published: it contained two introductions, one by Mayakovsky, and the other by

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Lunacharsky. In Mayakovsky's introduction, he sought to convince his readers that the Futurists were "the young poets of Russia who have found a spiritual release in the revolution and who have taken up the barricades of art." The Futurists were necessary to the proletariat because they were "providing socialism with the new word," which was the Futurists' poetic contribution to the revolutionary struggle, analogous, if not identical, to the political and military struggle.79 In his introduction, Lunacharsky, with the ambivalence often characteristic of a cautious politician, emphasized both the positive and negative in Futurist poetry so as to meet the test of Bolshevik support, on the one hand, and to counter potential criticism, on the other. He pointed out the great difficulties of the Futurists in the past in publishing their poetry because of their revolutionary poetic forms and their struggle against "accepted conventions." The task of the Soviet regime in publishing their works was to present to the mass readers "new and fresh" literary currents which could sow the seeds of a new art. This possibility alone justified the mistake of publishing the Futurists' poetry; and to restrain the Futurists was to impede the growth of that art. However bad, unpopular and strange their poetry, it was nonetheless infused with youth, revolution, courage, audacity and defiance, and contained "a grandeur close to our hearts." In particular, Lunacharsky concluded, no revolutionary could remain indifferent to the many resonant tones in Mayakovsky's poetry.80 The above list of books were published within a period of some eight months, despite difficulties: lack of paper, the breakdown of printing presses and other technical problems. Brik and Mayakovsky had planned to publish other books and anticipated reissues of published books, but this did not materialize because of the establishment of the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) in May 1919. It is necessary to describe the outcome of Brik's publishing venture because it bears significantly on Mayakovsky's publication difficulties after 1919, on the publication of his works after his tragic suicide, and on the ideological resistence within the Soviet regime to the Futurists as a whole. In May 1919 the Soviet regime sought to bring under its control and supervision "the publishing work of all scholars and literary associations, and all other publishing houses as well" by creating a State Publishing House, Gosizdat. This meant that The Art of the Young had either to terminate its publishing work or channel future publications through Gosizdat. Since, however, Brik expected to publish six

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additional books under that imprint which had already been approved and slated for publication, he tried to circumvent Gosizdat by requesting on July 18 that Lunacharsky himself authorize the subsidy for the publications. Brik probably knew that the regime's termination of the newspaper, "The Art of the Commune," of which he was the editor from December 1918 to May 1919, did not augur favorably for additional publications of the Futurists and Formalists. The regime terminated the Futurists' newspaper partly because of its claims that Futurist art was a "state" and "proletarian" art—claims that the regime repudiated because they contradicted its policy of favoring the free development of all artistic and literary groups. Even Mayakovsky tried to circumvent Gosizdat by signing another contract with Malkin on July 11 for the publication of his new revolutionary play "150 000 000" (five-thousand copies) and a second edition of "The Unsifted Word" (ten-thousand copies), but the contract never took effect.81 Lunacharsky, however, could not accomodate Brik's request for the subsidy because it was beyond his jurisdiction; and he turned the matter over to Gosizdat to resolve and expressed his personal approval of the publication subsidy. After discussing the matter on July 24, Gosizdat refused to approve the subsidy for the publications of The Art of the Young. On August 1, Lunacharsky requested that Gosizdat pay the honorariums to the Futurists and Formalists for their contributions that would not be published. But on the previous day Gosizdat had already decided to that effect, which suggests that Lunacharsky had consulted with Gosizdat on the matter. Dinershtein suggests that Brik, Mayakovsky and the majority of the contributors to "The Art of the Young" participated in the discussion of Gosizdat on July 31.82 The obvious and compelling question is why Gosizdat refused to publish the works of the Futurists and Formalists while it was supporting other publishing houses? Certainly the critical shortage of paper was one factor, but there were others. After the storm of controversy that surrounded the Futurists' newspaper "The Art of the Commune," the regime no longer wished to be "officially" identified with the Futurists, however great the demand for their works. There can be little doubt that this was a principal factor. Another was the "conservative" or "classical" literary tastes of Gosizdat's leaders, especially those of Vorovsky, Meshcheryakov, and Vyacheslav Polonsky, a literary critic who was an arch enemy of the Futurists, despite his protestations to the contrary.83 Vorovsky, for example, considered

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Futurist poetry unintelligible to the masses, a charge that was commonly levelled at the Futurists during the prerevolutionary period, and would continue throughout the 1920's.84 In early April 1919, Polonsky, in a debate on avant-garde art with the artist Yakulov, saw Futurism in a process of disintegration, a movement that negated everything, "without having made any positive artistic achievements, any real revolutionary art."85 Brik, Mayakovsky and other Futurists and Formalists were present during the debate. Gosizdat's leaders, therefore, did not "recognize" Mayakovsky's poetic talent in service of the Bolshevik regime. Or, as Dinershtein has expressed it, they were highly critical of "left art," with Mayakovsky as its "most gaudy representative."86 T o publish Mayakovsky—and other Futurists — meant promoting a poetry that they found "artistically" misguided, decadent and thus dangerous to the proletariat. They did not doubt at all Mayakovsky's political commitment to the regime, but they believed that his formalistic poetic orientation and verbal play vitiated that commitment. In sum, then, Mayakovsky's politics was acceptable, but not his poetry. Put differently, Mayakovsky the man and Mayakovsky the Futurist poet were discrete categories. Furthermore, Dinershtein points out that it would have been difficult for the leaders of Gosizdat to single out Mayakovsky's works for publication and isolate him from the Futurist group, since he was one of its most passionate and convinced votaries.87 But this was not so much difficult as impossible. This initial bureaucratic resistence to, and dislike for, Mayakovsky's poetry became ingrained and ultimately institutionalized within Gosizdat and largely continued until Stalin's personal canonization of Mayakovsky in 1936. Then, by a radical reversal, Gosizdat became one of Mayakovsky's most prolific publishers. T o date, some seventy-five million copies of Mayakovsky's poetry have been published in various forms in the Soviet Union—a truly astonishing figure by any standard. It may very well be that the refusal of Gosizdat to publish the works of the Futurists was closely related to another major episode in January 1919. It was then that the Futurists were at the height of political power in directing the art life of the whole country; and they could not resist the temptation to engage in polemics with Proletkult, which claimed in November 1918 that "the strength of its revolution lay not only in a political and military dictatorship, but also in a cutltural dictatorship."88 As the Futurists became in a way the de facto cultural rep-

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resentatives of the Bolshevik regime, Brik tried to institutionalize Futurism and Formalism within it as a "political collective," or as a "school of communist ideology" in direct competition with Proletkult. Perhaps Brik realized that, although a "communist" ideology was not a condition for the Futurists' existence or survival at the immediate moment, it would eventually be the acid test from the perspective of the Bolshevik regime; and this was the strategic moment to demonstrate the Futurists' political commitment to the regime, however vague or ambiguous that commitment. In the context of the period, political commitment would confer greater legitimacy to the Futurists' principles and was thus a necessary condition for an effective ideological struggle with Proletkult on its own terms for supremacy. Brik called this organization Kom-Fut, or Communists-Futurists, and it originated in the Vyborg regional Party apparatus. Two meetings were held in January 1919 to define the organizational structure, principles and membership. In its programmatic declaration, written as a kind of Communist Manifesto, using Marx's slogan, "Proletarians of all countries, unite!," Brik and Kushner wrote that "A communist society demands a communist consciousness. All forms of life, morality, philosophy and art must be re-created on communist principles. Without this, the further development of the communist revolution is impossible." Brik and Kushner pointed out, in a direct allusion to Proletkult, that the "cultural-educational organs of the Soviet regime completely misunderstood the revolutionary tasks that have been imposed on them," and that their "hastily knocked-together socialdemocratic ideology was unable to counter the centuries-old experience of bourgeois ideologists who were exploiting for their own interests proletarian cultural-educational organizations." Their declaration continued: "Under the guise of immutable truths, a false doctrine is being presented to the masses. Under the guise of universal truth is the morality of the exploiters. Under the guise of the eternal laws of beauty is the corrupted taste of the oppressors."89 One can only ponder Lunacharsky's reaction to the declaration, since he was so closely identified with Proletkult. As for Kom-Fut's administrative staff, Kushner was its chairman and organizer, while Brik was responsible for the "organization of the school of communist ideology." As for membership requirements, any Party member who espoused the "cultural-ideological program" of Kom-Fut could join. Interestingly, Mayakovsky was not a member of

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Kom-Fut because he refused to rejoin the Party. He noted that, if he had been a Party member, he would have been sent to Astrakhan to catch fish.90 He was, however, indirectly connected with Kom-Fut. Kom-Fut got off to a good start. Mayakovsky observes that there was "a joyous welcome" for the Futurists in Vyborg.91 A series of lectures on art and poetry were held and others were projected, dealing with such topics as "The Ideology of the Aristocrats," "The Ideology of the Bourgeoisie," "The Ideology of Social-Democracy," "Futurism," "Communists-Futurists." After each lecture discussions were held. Brochures on various subjects were also projected for publication, but nothing came of them. 92 On January 19, 1919 Kushner wrote to the Central Committee of the Party, through the Vyborg Party apparatus, to register Kom-Fut as a "Party collective" under the Bolshevik regime. Kushner stated in the application, in an apparent reference to Proletkult, that the "whole orientation of the work of Soviet organs in the cultural-ideological domain was completely unrevolutionary," and that there was an "urgent need to include also this facet of social work into the sphere of Party influence." 93 That Kushner meant the Futurists as well is not clear, but the implication may have been that the activities of Proletkult were to be brought under the direct control of Lunacharsky's Commissariat of Enlightenment, or of the Futurists themselves, who were the cultural representatives of the Commissariat, and therefore of the Bolshevik regime. The Party, however, rejected Kom-Fut's registration, with the reason that it did not "envisage collectives of a similar kind" and that approval of similar collectives would "create an undesirable precedent." 94 Perhaps this meant that only Proletkult could be the true cultural representative of the regime or Party. Later, Lunacharsky recalled this episode; he noted that the Futurists were told to join the Party as regular members. His recollection may indicate his participation in the decision to deny the registration of Kom-Fut.95, This rejection of Kom-Fut's cultural-ideological association with the regime did not, however, discourage Brik; for in January 1921 Brik, now the new chairman of the Institute for Artistic Culture (Inkhuk) that the Section of Fine Arts had organized in May 1920, tried once again to link a much larger group of figures in the art, theatre, literary and photography world with the Bolshevik regime. Brik attempted this even though the Party, in an official statement in December 1920, termed the Futurists (and Proletkult) "advocates of an idealist

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philosophy alien to Marxism" and attacked them for "imparting absurd, perverted tastes to workers" in the realm of art. 96 Brik was now the chairman of Kom-Fut, and Lily Brik was its secretary. The other members included, among others: Mayakovsky, Meyerhold, Shterenberg, Altman, Kushner and Aleksei Gan. Malkin was also included; and his special task was to organize Meyerhold's plays and Mayakovsky's poetry readings specifically for the Party hierarchy in view of his direct and immediate connections with it. Brik hoped to attract many artists from one large art group to Kom-Fut, but this was not especially successful. Brik also instructed the adherents of Kom-Fut in Lunacharsky's Commissariat, which was then under reorganization, to pursue the cultural program of Kom-Fut.91 As for Kom-Fut's organizational tie to the regime, Party membership could obviously play no role in the light of the Party's attacks on the Futurists. Brik defined the tie as follows: "Kom-Fut is a definite cultural-ideological movement within the Party as an art group with respect to the theoretical elaboration, manifestation and implementation of the fundamentals of a communist, and of the transition to a communist, culture." 90 In this second attempt to gain official Party recognition, Malkin was a central figure in the over-all strategy. On January 31, 1921 Malkin met with Lenin to arrange for Mayakovsky's personal recitation of his play, "Mystery-Bouffe," to Lenin. It appears that Lenin's approval of the play would serve as a prelude to a discussion or a proposal of Kom-Fut's link with the regime. Shortly after, Malkin wrote to Meyerhold, who planned to stage Mayakovsky's play for the 10th Party Congress in March, that Lenin had agreed to listen to Mayakovsky's recitation. Curiously, however, Malkin added that it would be "better to wait" for the actual staging of the play.99 As to why Malkin preferred this is a matter of conjecture. There is evidence that he himself was in political trouble in connection with Central Press.100 It may be that Lenin himself agreed to see Mayakovsky's play only at a theatre, but not personally listen to Mayakovsky's recitation. The view that Malkin did not "carry the matter through" does not say much.101 It may be, too, that Lenin actually declined Malkin's offer; and in his letter to Meyerhold, Malkin simply did not want to disappoint him, and thus led Meyerhold to believe that Lenin would attend the performance, but this never happened. After January, Kom-Fut again came to naught until April 1921, when Malkin personally presented Lenin with a copy of Mayakovsky's

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"150,000,000" (published anonymously by Gosizdat), which contained the following inscription on the cover: "To Comrade Vladimir Ilich with Kom-Fut greetings." The signatures of Mayakovsky, Brik, Lily Brik, Kushner, Malkin, Shterenberg and Altman followed. Lenin's attitude to Mayakovsky's work, however, was wholly negative; he called it a "hooligan" brand of communism and criticized Lunacharsky for publishing too many copies of it.102 By the middle of 1921, the brief, heady and turbulent period of Futurist supremacy was over. During three years of revolutionary turmoil, what the Futurists and Formalists achieved under Brik's guidance in terms of an artistic revolution is historically unprecedented. The Formalists redirected notions of literature and art to the paramount importance of devices, forms and craftsmanship. No literary or art movement that emerged after 1921 remained without the tangible influence of the Futurists and Formalists. After 1921, a long, bitter and courageous struggle to survive now as an independent movement of Futurists and Formalists lay ahead, with Brik still as its guiding theoretician. The "transfer" of Malkin in July 1921 to the remote Urals to head a publishing house there could not fail to compound the Futurists' and Formalists' struggle and Mayakovsky's publishing difficulties with Gosizdat.103 In August 1921, Mayakovsky's "poetic" letter to Malkin amply demonstrates the profound significance of his role in Mayakovsky's popularity and in the Futurist and Formalist movement as a whole during the revolutionary years: When, having feared the futurist lynx, they would put spokes in our wheels, we would implore: 'Save us, Father Boris!' And the enemies would wither away before the furious Malkin. I'm not a very clever fellow, but the devil will understand it, the will of the creator. In a word, let me come to Ekaterinburg, if that's what is necessary to escape from the mad State-Publisher.104 But the Party's growing hostility to the Futurists did not blunt their revolutionary fervor for literary change and relevance. This hostility

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assumed new and far more formidable dimensions, not only from the Party and its bureaucratic structure, but from literary groups that emerged in the course of the 1920's. No doubt the Futurists themselves bear a good measure of responsibility for the intensely fierce and acrimonious debates that are characteristic of the literary scene of the 1920's; but the growing realization that only one literary group would eventually meet the ideological demands of the Party was perhaps the most critical factor in the intensity of the literary struggle.

CHAPTER TWO

In dealing with Brik's views on the role and place of art and the artist in a communist society, one much approach them, however umbrageous, radical and Utopian for their time, against the background of the Bolshevik revolution; for it is largely, if not wholly, in terms of the premises and promises of the revolution that Brik's views take on consistency, clarity and meaning. In brief theoretical terms, the Bolshevik revolution meant above all the destruction of the bourgeois political and social order and the creation of a workers' society, a classless collective order which would involve the conscious participation of the working masses in the administration of the industrial construction of communism.1 As Lenin and Marx envisioned it, the revolution would ultimately lead to the workers' liberation from all forms of political opression, exploitation and bureaucratic organization. Lenin conceived the participation of the working masses (society) in the administration of things as a check against the growth of a ruling bureaucracy. Society would ultimately supersede the state, which Lenin and Marx invariably viewed as a coercive and oppressive institution. The Bolshevik state, "the dictatorship of the proletariat," was not in principle the instrument for the creation of the communist society, but the transitional engine for the destruction of all class antagonisms and opposition to the revolution. Once "the dictatorship of the proletariat" had fulfilled this task, it no longer had any reason for existence; and this stage would mark "the realm of freedom", the stateless society. In substance, these were Lenin's theoretical views shortly before the revolution, as expressed in his State and Revolution, which was published in May 1918. Approximately a year later, Lunacharsky echoed Lenin's views in relation to the arts: "We are anti-state; we are endeavoring to create an order in which the state is wholly absent. We are endeavoring to create a united, organized economy which is based on free human associations. Any

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bureaucracy is deadly, even a socialist one, especially on the arts." 2 Shortly after the revolution, however, Lenin observed that he and other Bolshevik leaders held "presuppositions, not always perhaps openly expressed, but always silently taken for granted, about an immediate transition to the building of socialism."3 In April 1918, Lenin remarked to Bukharin that the priority of the day was not "to destroy the old state," but "to create the state of the commune." 4 While the apocalyptic experience of the revolution inspired these Utopian aspirations, it also raised profoundly complex issues and problems that the Bolshevik leaders had never anticipated and compelled them in late 1920 to abandon their more impractical aims or, at any rate, to relegate them to an indefinite future. The fundamental problem that concerns us here is the role and place of art and the artist in a communist society, from the perspective of the revolution and its stated goals. The Bolshevik leaders, especially Lenin and Trotsky, had no theories about this before the revolution. 5 But their view of the novelist's role, shaped by their admiration for the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, is perhaps applicable here to the artist as well. The function of the novelist and artist—except for the latter's participation in Lenin's project of "monumental propaganda"—would undergo no substantive change in the transition from bourgeois to communist society. They would, presumably, continue to concern themselves with the fate of the individual in a collective society, with the alienated hero in spiritual conflict with the values of his age, with fictional and imaginary realities—despite the fact that the Bolshevik revolution was made with a view to vanquishing all conflict and alienation between the individual and society, to creating the real, rational communist, socialist reality, and to resolving the final destiny of the individual. That the Bolshevik leaders never really examined their own emotional, psychological and contemplative dependence on the Russian classics is more than possible. The revolutionary transformation of man and society to which they were committed could not efface the enthralling effect that the Russian classics had on them. Hence, for example, Lenin's preference of Pushkin to Mayakovsky, even though the latter's propagandists art and poetry were far more—put mildly—in accord with Lenin's political views on the role of art and literature, i. e. as an instrument of propaganda. If the Bolshevik leaders were unaware of the inherent inconsistency between their views on the role of the novelist and artist in a commu-

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nist society and their revolutionary aims concerning the transformation of man in a collective society, surely Brik was not. Brik saw the fundamental irrelevance of bourgeois art and literature in the new communist society. They were, after all, in Marxist terms a basic function and reflection of the political, social and economic "superstructure" of bourgeois society which the Bolshevik leaders were determined to destroy. For Brik, therefore, the Bolshevik revolution marked a total, radical break with bourgeois society and its cultural forms; it introduced a new revolutionary content which demanded for its artistic expression a new set of perceptual modes and forms of work. The function of the novelist and artist was not to interpret reality "artistically," but to change it in accord with Marx's injunction. What is more, the Bolshevik revolution appeared to confirm Brik's formalist views on the revolutionary nature of literary and artistic processes. Not unlike political revolution, literary and artistic revolution was a process of struggles, breaks, shifts, changes and reactions in literary and artistic forms for ascendancy in the renewal of perceptual modes. To postulate a hierarchy of literary and artistic forms was an ignorant misunderstanding of literary and artistic history, because each age canonized its own forms; and this process of canonization meant the de-canonization of previous forms which had exhausted their perceptual function. As the principal spokesman for the artistic avant-garde, Brik is the representative man, in the sense that his views accurately typify the mood and thought of the avant-garde, the group that was so fervently committed to revolutionary artistic change." Brik's views of the revolutionary years (1918-1920) often appear to convey the impression that he was for the end of art, but this is a misconception. He was against the isolation of art from daily life and for its massive integration or penetration into life. If there is one central, unifying idea that governs his thinking, it is that "artistic" existence determines consciousness, or as he himself noted, "the creation of the ideal conditions for the development of artistic talent in the masses."7 Perhaps this idea is no less Utopian than Lenin's idea of the inherent administrative talents of the masses which the Bolshevik revolution had expected to reveal. At any rate, it is on this basis that Brik proceeded to define the artistic principles that would adequately correspond to and enhance the aims of a communist society. These principles stemmed from his conviction that the Bolshevik revolution had robbed artistic traditions of their relevance and that a political, social and economic revolution

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by itself was not enough to transform reality. A psychological revolution was equally necessary, with the artist as the major agent in creating the psychological revolution in the masses. For Brik, art could no longer be an object of idle amusement and private esthetic gratification, but had to become in a communist society an integral part of the daily life of all.8 He debunked what he saw as the myths and idols of bourgeois culture, which were preponderant, mesmerizing impediments to the immediate constructive task at hand; and in this process of debunking, Brik was also engaged in fierce polemics with the political opponents of the avant-garde (and the Futurists) at the time, Proletkult, which in the summer of 1918 set up its own section of fine arts as a rival to the government's Section. Curiously, however, almost all of Proletkult's ideas and plans for proletarian art, except for the emphasis on assimilating the cultural traditions of the past and the "purity" of proletarian ideology in artistic activity, are strikingly similar to those of Brik and the Section of Fine Arts.9 Brik asserted that bourgeois art was a miasmic "swamp" that effectively distorted the contours of the real world. The initial, necessary task of the proletariat was to drain the swamp and then direct itself to the creation of real material things for human and cultural needs. He exhorted artists to work in communes, plants, factories and workshops, to establish institutes of material culture so as to create "things that have never been seen before," "the future works of art." 10 As Brik saw it, ideas, emotions and imaginary realities were no longer the artist's essential purview in a communist society. In the new social and economic organization that it would engender, the artist would ultimately abandon the realm of imaginary reality and embrace the objective world of "real things," from which he is alienated and in which he must reify himself. The artist's object of reification was a "real thing," his new artistic canvas, which no longer reflects an illusory reality, but personifies reality itself. Brik then directed his attack against Proletkult's uncritical worship of the culture of the past. He found it odd that, while the proletariat had destroyed many "gods" in the course of the revolutionary upheaval, it curiously defended "the temples of art," Pushkin, Raphael and other "holy fathers" from the assaults of the Futurists. Brik assured Proletkult that the Futurists did not deny the genuine historical significance of their works; nor did the Futurists intend to destroy their works, but only wanted to strip them of "the halo of holiness that surrounds these infallible popes of the esthetic church."11 In an indirect

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allusion to the Bolshevik leaders, Brik observed that "the builders of communist culture" misunderstood "the working nature of art." In their speeches and writings, they spoke of the artist's need "to create," "to convey ideas," "to serve beauty." Brik considered these notions "idle," "bourgeois habits," because art did not consist in ideas, but in "action" (deistvie). To be enthralled by the "dead beauty of the past" meant to be blind to the need to create a new culture. Brik reminded Proletkult that Marx had remarked how "the traditions of all obsolete generations weigh like a nightmare over the heads of the living" in the struggle to create a new culture.12 Brik also observed that Lenin had pointed out in his "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky" that it was the responsibility of artists themselves to create a proletarian culture and "to make appropriate conclusions to realize without hesitation the dictatorship of the proletariat in all spheres of life, knowledge and art." 13 Brik went on to remark that Proletkult was wrongheaded in its notion that training workers in the arts would produce "proletarian art." On the contrary, the result would be a "wretched parody of long-obsolete art forms of the past." Brik defined the artist as one who combines internally artistic talent and proletarian consciousness in socially useful work for his "own collective society," in contrast to the bourgeois artist who ranged himself against a hostile and alien crowd.14 Brik's views during the revolutionary period reveal the extent to which he was a consistent theoretician of Marxism, which he made an integral component of his own esthetic theory. He provided an ideological, "technical" framework for the artist to assume his place and role in a communist society, but this did not mean that the artist would lose his "symbolic" role. Brik arrived at the logical, but not particularly pleasant, conclusion that if art is essentially a craft, a function of organizing and constructing materials, then the artist had to become a worker in that society; and it was largely as such, Brik believed, that the artist could realize his true purpose and identity in a communist society. Brik claimed that, unlike bourgeois society, in which a small group of privileged people created, the communist society needed artists who were engaged in conscious creative activity for social and cultural needs. In that society, artists could no longer claim to be "higher," "spiritual" beings, "priests" or "prophets." In bourgeois society, artists were so because they tried "to realize their freedom not in life, but in dreams." A communist society, however, liberated the artist from a market economy and an anonymous public and allowed

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him "to do things in his own natural way." What does the artist do in a communist society? Brik elaborated: "These artists know how to make paintings, decorations, to paint ceilings and walls, to make sketches, placards, signs, monuments and many other things. Such artists are needed in the commune. They do completely determined, socially useful work; they do real work which requires special competence, special knowledge."15 Once Brik had defined the artist's role as a "cultural" worker, he then proceeded to establish the conditions of his work. He projected a society of artistic communes in which artists would cooperate in common purpose. As a cultural historian, Brik saw that the highest development of art often coincided with those historical periods when artists worked in communes.16 He pointed to the Hellenic and Renaissance periods as examples. The rise of industrial society, however, destroyed the artistic communes and pitted artists against each other beyond the social structure to which they belonged and whose aspirations they shared and represented. Before the rise of industrial society, art was a function of specific social and cultural needs and purposes for specific "known" persons. Brik thus persuaded artists to return to artistic communes, established by the state and the Section, so as "to develop and forge artistic individuality" through "the constant creative interaction of artists." According to Brik, there were five basic principles that governed the operations of the state artistic communes: 1) They were created at the expense of the state; 2) The function of the commune was to assist the state in a wide variety of social and state needs: the creation of monuments, the decoration of homes, buildings, squares, theatres, museums, auditoriums, libraries, clubs, government institutions, cities on festive occasions; the illustration of books, providing visual aids for schools; designing stamps and silverware. In short, the commune would do all "that is necessary for the development of the state artistic industry;" 3) All the work of the commune, whether commissioned or done on an individual basis, would be state property; 4) The communes would accept commissions from various social and private organizations, but all remuneration would be given to the state; 5) The communes would be "internally" autonomous and self-regulating.17 Brik realized, however, that there would be great opposition from many artists to working in state artistic communes. He therefore proposed the creation of private communes which would provide the artist with greater economic benefit than the state commune, which

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economically placed "the artist in definite, straitened limits." Brik felt, however, that the artist in a state commune, although he would be poorer, would be freer artistically because his "psyche and will' would not be perverted by the pursuit of material gain. He noted that "historical experience demonstrates that for the development of art, competition, rivalry and the struggle for existence has acted as a brake, not a stimulus, on the progress of art." Although Brik supported the private commune, he doubted its viability because he felt that "some artists in the private commune would earn more than others; some would live at the expense of others; some would want to live outside the commune; and these factors would produce factionalism and the decay of the private commune."18 Brik went beyond persuading artists to join communes. He formulated the basic principles which guided the Section of Fine Arts in establishing free artistic workshops (Svomas—svobodnye masterskie) and industrial workshops. He remarked that "all our hopes are focused on them for the magnificent growth of artistic culture."19 As noted, the ground for realizing a revolutionary form of artistic education had already been made in April 1918, when Lenin abolished the Academy of Arts, which controlled the artistic education of the country through decrees that stifled artistic innovation and talent. Brik saw the distinctive characteristics of the free artistic workshops in the opportunity for free and open debate, "independent searchings," "enlightened inquiry" and the "freedom of the coexistence of the most diverse artistic groups and trends in the walls of a single educational institution."20 The plan was designed to attract young students to the vocation of art. All art students under the former Academy were eligible to enroll in the free workshops, as well as others over the age of sixteen, regardless of educational background. Students had the choice of selecting their own art instructors within a workshop, of being assigned an instructor, or of working independently in the fields of painting, architecture, sculpture, mosaics and engraving.21 Students were allowed to manage the workshops in collaboration with an elected council. The major function of an art instructor was to maintain discipline in the student's work and to encourage him to discovery and innovation. After the completion of a work, the student had to present it to a board for critical appraisal.22 Brik's ultimate hope for the artistic transformation of the country lay in "productive art" (proizvodstvennoe iskusstvo) in plants and factories, for they were "the instruments of collective creative art." 23 For Brik, the machine was destined to play a vital role in the future of

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society, capable of creating "miracles" far beyond human capacities. On this assumption, Brik collaborated with workers' unions and handicraft artels to establish artistic workshops in plants and factories throughout the country, with a view to uniting the arts with the crafts in the textile, porcelain, glass, metal, wood and clothing industries. Unlike the free artistic workshops, students and workers had to demonstrate their abilities in art and a craft, respectively; and they would learn from each other under the guidance of an art instructor in giving artistic form to the materials of production.24 Brik's definition of the worker's role in the productive process confronted directly the problem of the worker's alienation from his work: "We want every worker who gives a definite form and color to an object to cease to be a mechanical executor of some plan that is alien to him. He must consciously and actively participate in the artistic process of creating things. Then there will be no need for a special group of artists-decorators. Artistry will blend into the very creation of things."25 The aim of the industrial workshops was to develop or create articles of everyday use according to artistic prototypes, expressive of "national character" and "folk art," and then be mass produced not so much as commercial products, but as esthetic, cultural products. Brik pointed out that "these articles must serve as models so as to convey an understanding of the object to the masses, to develop the artistic tastes of the masses and to renew the life of the grey, miserable countryside."26 Brik's hope, however romantic or Utopian but surely quite characteristic of the revolutionary optimism of the period, was that the artistically produced articles would arouse the latent "collective creative" talents of the masses, who in turn would spontaneously participate in their own way in the artistic and cultural transformation of the country. This was the substance of the spiritual and psychological revolution, without which the political, social and economic revolution could not succeed. As Brik subtly suggested in 1923: "The October revolution took political and economic power from the bourgeoisie and passed it on to the proletariat. But the power of the revolution has not touched the hearts and minds [of the masses]."27 Despite the "profoundly new and revolutionary" nature of the free artistic and industrial workshops, certain problems began to erode their successful beginnings. In the free workshops, the major problem was, paradoxically, excessive freedom bordering on anarchy, because students lacked necessary pedagogical guidance and discipline.28 This led to apathy and disaffection among students. Bitter conflicts arose over

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the primacy or superiority of particular art trends within workshops. Many students reacted vigorously against the abstractionist artistic theories and styles of the avant-garde, and either abandoned the workshops or embraced Realism.29 Perhaps this was somewhat a result of the avant-garde's belief that established artistic attitudes and traditions could be easily discarded and their own styles easily assimilated. The avant-garde's envious critics, those who belonged to the former Academy of Art, complained chronically that the art and the theories of the avant-garde were "unintelligible" to the students so as to frustrate the operations of the workshops. Many of these critics also refused to cooperate in general. As for the industrial workshops, although they fared much better, the lack of vital materials and the complex problem of applying artistic principles to various articles and to productive processes were the major difficulties. The avant-garde artists who headed the Section of Fine Arts became conscious of these problems in the workshops. The Section itself, it must be noted, was a loose coalition of diverse personalities who were largely united by the idea of artistic experimentation and novelty, of the direction and purpose of art's influence on the human psyche, of the artist's "self-defined" role in a communist society, and of art's penetration into and thus union with, life. They believed, however naively, that an artistic revolution was the natural concomitance of the Bolshevik revolution. What divided them was the means to achieve those ends, means consistent with the autonomy of art. They realized that a certain crisis was at hand which demanded immediate and effective action, that a set of theoretical principles was necessary to provide better direction to the education of art and also to form a greater semblance of unity among themselves. In the spring of 1920, therefore, the Section of Fine Arts organized the Institute for Artistic Culture (Inkhuk—Institut khudozhestvennoi kultury) in an effort to formulate a scientific, objective program that would represent a synthesis of the arts, a formulation of principles around which the avant-garde artists would rally. This task was given to Vasily Kandinsky, who became the Chairman of Inkhuk; and he presented his detailed program to the Institute in May 1920. His program invites examination for its theoretical significance and for the polemic }t contains with the productivists within Inkhuk, whose theoretician was Brik, over artistic means and ends. Kandinsky's impressive program is essentially a set of specific, general and vague guidelines for the Institute's comprehensive investi-

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gation of the real and potential relationships between artistic phenomena and psychic reactions on man. As he described it, the Institute's aim was to establish "a scientific method which investigates analytically and synthetically the fundamental elements of the individual arts as well as art as a whole."30 His program contained a theoretical statement on three levels: 1) on individual aspects of art; 2) on the inter-relationships of individual aspects of art; 3) on monumental art as a whole. In the preface tho his program, Kandinsky viewed art as "reaction" or "influence" (vozdeistvie) on man's psyche. The function of the artist, in the act of creation, was to devote himself to ordering his responses in a form characteristic of his art. Upon completion, the artist was to analyze his work in terms of its "visual" mood, of its reaction on the psyche. Kandinsky did not pose the vital question of the validity of a work as art beyond its ability to act on the psyche. A process of selecting properties was involved here, from Kandinsky's perspective, for their basic aim had to be "psychological in nature." In terms of artistic forms, Kandinsky's analysis resulted in a formulation of their ability to act on the psyche: a) painting as color-volume form b) sculpture as space-volume form c) architecture as volume-space form d) music as sonorous and temporal form e) dance as temporal and spatial form f) poetry as sonoro-vocal and temporal form When Kandinsky came to art as such, he determined that the sketch and color forms were peculiar to it. The former comprised the line and its point of departure, the dot, produced by the line. The line and the plane were also subdivided into geometric and non-geometric forms. Kandinsky proposed that the reaction of people to geometric forms be described and catalogued so as to observe "parallel impressions in the sounds of various musical instruments, in impressions from various words, objects, nature, architectural works, animals, plants, etc." Kandinsky considered it necessary to establish a connection between the movements of lines and that of a human body as a whole and in its parts. In his discussion of color forms in their "absolute value," Kandinsky posited three groups for exploration: 1) the elementary color triad: red, blue, yellow 2) the spectral blending of colors, i. e. combinations of these elementary colors: violet, orange, green

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3) the pictorial blending of colors, i. e. combinations of all the mentioned colors on the palette, beginning with brown, gray, violet, etc., and ending with the most complex colors, which Kandinsky was unable to define. According to Kandinsky, the Institute was to use the services of specialists who were working in the field of color, such as physicists, psychologists, doctors, chromotherapists, specialists in eye diseases, psychiatrists, and those in occult fields, so as to broaden the investigation of the reaction of colors on man's psyche. In the plan for the inter-relationships of the individual arts, Kandinsky bemoaned the fact that architecture, sculpture and art were unnaturally separated historically, and suggested that they unite in the creation of a "monumental art." He advocated research into volume forms of geometrical types: pyramids, cubes, spheres in red, yellow and green; and once "the element of displacement" was introduced into the research, it would gradually lead to the realm of free forms. "In this way, a whole world of abstract volume essences is created." Kandinsky hoped that the unity of art, architecture and sculpture would create "a large model of a building dedicated to the great Utopia, to that Utopia which has always been the scarecrow of the narrow-minded, and without which no spiritual movement is possible." Kandinsky reminded the Institute that the cultivation of abstract achievements was as necessary as abstract forms. In the final part of his program concerning monumental art, Kandinsky suggested that painters, architects, sculptors, music composers, dramatists, theatrical directors, ballet dancers and circus figures unite to create a new theatre by applying principles peculiar to their respective art. He enumerated the "means of expression" for the Institute's investigation. He devoted particular attention to the role of movements and gestures on the stage, which he considered "language without words." These movements and gestures would involve the spectator's participation in the theatre. Kandinsky also proposed analysis of the "internal value of the [poetic] word" without reference to meaning. Inkhuk was to experiment with "individual sounds" for the formation of new word combinations. He drew an analogy between the sounds of words and a painting, "where the form, apart from its obedience to an object, has a self-contained existence." The formation of new sound and word combinations, like the study of movements and gestures on the stage, would be subjects for inquiry in relation to psychic reactions. Finally, Kandinsky remarked that the science of astronomy, botany

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and even crystallography, among others, could be useful in the theoretical investigation of art. There was one science, however, that was wholly anathema to Kandinsky. He observed, in an obvious reference to Brik and the productivists: "Art workers, who now have almost no precise rules, who are engaged at the present time, if only in the problems of [art] construction, can easily and with exaggerated enthusiasm seek a positive solution for these problems in mechanics. Having found it there, they can mistakenly take the answer of mechanics for the answer to art. This is one of the most serious dangers against which we must constantly guard ourselves and our colleagues in theoretical work." We have dealt at some length on this theoretical program so as to point out Kandinsky's own artistic theories, which he has imaginatively synthesized with other leading artistic theories of the time, namely: Rodchenko's, Klyun's and Malevich's theories of Non-Objective art and Suprematism;31 Meyerhold's theory of Biomechanics for the stage and theatre;32 and Khlebnikov's and Kruchonykh's theory of "trans-rational language" in poetry (zaumny yazyk).33 The syncretic orientation of Kandinsky's program is also noteworthy. Above all, perhaps, the program reflects principles that were common to the arts since about 1910: that "art" is a product of conscious devices, a specific mode of organization and perception, and that the meaning of an "art" work is subordinate to, i. e. self-contained in, its "constructive" elements: sounds, words, forms, colors, lines, texture and movements the purpose of which is not to reflect reality, but to deform it. Kandinsky's notions of abstract art were also quite similar to the findings of the poetic and linguistic studies of the Russian Formalists in the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz). The Formalists saw the aim of art in evoking sensation of the poetic object as a vision, and not as cognition of reality. They drew an opposition between practical, communicative language and poetic language similar to Kandinsky's view of the opposition between representational art and abstract art. The liberated word in Futurist "trans-rational" poetry, like the liberated line in an abstract painting, assumed, as we have noted, a self-contained reality and existence with its own particular esthetic value. For the Formalists, practical language evoked an automated perception from the reader; the "trans-rational" language of Futurist poetry de-automated and renewed perception as its primary function. The liberated words in that poetry, like the liberated lines in an abstract painting, became an object in themselves without external reference.

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Like the Formalists, Kandinsky was concerned in his program with the specific materials and forms of art for their psychic effect on the viewer. They both saw art essentially as an autonomous system of signs.34 There appears to be, however, a larger significance to Kandinsky's theoretical program. That he was unable to present to Inkhuk a cogent and practical program for the arts points to the conclusion that the avant-garde artistic trends that had prevailed in Russia since 1910 had lost relevance and potential for further experimentation. In other words, they had run their course and could no longer be reclaimed in and of themselves. Even in terms of artistic practice, Bowlt points out that "Though Malevich attempted to reaffirm the purity of Suprematism in 1917-1918 by a series of monochrome canvases, it was clear that its potential was exhausted."35 These artistic trends or theories—Suprematism, Non-Objectivism, Cubism, among others —had some of their sources in Western art trends of the early twenthieth-century, and in Russian Symbolist esthetics and in the Cubo-Futurist notion of "trans-rationalism;" and oriented as they were towards abstraction and deformation, these trends were partly a reaction against, or an escape from, the increasing industrialization and its attendant culture. Kandinsky's program may be regarded as a form of belated resistence to any relationship between art and industry or to new artistic directions beyond abstract art. Moreover, all the art trends mentioned above required a rather highly developed sense of artistic ken and thus appealed largely to elite and sophisticated groups, of which there were very few in Russia. We have already seen how one critic considered Russian Futurist poetry tantamount to insanity. In the evolution of avant-garde art, the Bolshevik revolution played a paradoxical role. The revolution did nothing whatsoever to stifle that art. On the contrary, the revolution gave it new vigor and vitality and the unique opportunity, when the avant-garde came to political power, for "public" exposure, recognition and potential acceptance. But the revolution also exhausted the cult of novelty of avant-garde art, its capacity to evoke new artistic-intuitive perceptions of reality in nonobjective, abstract forms, and the experiments associated with them. In this process of rise and decline of avant-garde art, the revolution also regenerated the trend to Realism and representational forms which were peculiar to Russian art history. By the end of 1920, as the revolution exhausted itself, in the course of which many of the avantgarde's patrons had emigrated, the general, largely unsophisticated art "public" found little, if any, identity with avant-garde art in its more

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abstract forms. The "public" now preferred an art which would provide meaning and relation to the new revolutionary reality and its direction at a time of mounting pressures for historical continuity with native artistic traditions. No doubt the preference of the Bolshevik leaders—the new art patrons—for artistic Realism added significantly to the pressures, but even avant-garde artists themselves turned to it out of "personal, artistic conviction."36 And with the advent of the New Economic Policy in 1921, with its marked stress on industrial revival, the productivists sought to meet its challenge to a new artistic situation. For example, Malevich remarked in 1921: "Everything, the whole of our world must be clothed in suprematist form: textiles, wall-paper, pots, plates, furniture, sign-paintings, in short everything must be made according to the new form of harmony."37 In 1923, Aleksandra Exter noted: "A suit of clothes for mass consumption should consist of the most simple geometric forms, such as a rectangle, a square, a triangle. The rhythm of the color put into those forms will fully diversify their content." 38 When the avant-garde artists and theoreticians debated Kandinsky's program, they rejected it as an impractical and limited set of guidelines for the Institute and the workshops, which were then slated for reorganization. However abstract as a document, they nonetheless supported it for "laboratory" purposes. Kandinsky's rejection of the relationship between art and production, his denial of the artist's active role in society—these were rejected by the majority of the artists. Malevich himself reluctantly voted against it, despite the fact that his own artistic notions were embodied in Kandinsky's program. Brik's faction saw art's fusion with industrial production as the key to the artistic-cultural transformation of the country, while Kandinsky saw in abstract artistic forms the key to the spiritual and psychological life of man—even of great therapeutic potential as his theories seem to suggest. Brik and the productivists believed that Kandinsky's program could only evoke a "passive" psychological response in man to no fundamental direction, whereas they saw art's fusion with production as the immediate and effective stimulant to the creation of Utopia collectively, "massively'." All the avant-garde artists shared the passion for Utopia; the problem was to find the right road to it. Perhaps Brik's own theory was no less mystical than Kandinsky's, but it provided artists with a sense of constructive purpose and participation for which many artists longed, if not craved. More than this, however, the notion of productive art was rooted, interestingly enough, in the

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very art trends of the previous decade. Sarabyanov notes: "To a certain degree, the idea of productive art was grounded in the very course of the development of fine art. It is no accident that between 1910 and 1920 certain artistic tendencies acquired rather wide popularity which one may call a preliminary, latent form of constructivism. V. Tatlin . . . and his Petrograd and Moscow followers, by creating their counterreliefs and other constructions of various kinds, by combining different kinds of materials, not only prepared themselves for future productive art, but relied on the creation of works as self-valuable entities. Subsequently, they overcame that for the sake of making useful things, of being involved in the practical reconstruction of life.'39 The rejection of Kandinsky's program found Inkhuk divided and without theoretical direction as an organization. But since the productivists had the upper hand in the Presidium of Inkhuk, with Rodchenko, his wife Olga Stepanova and Brik as their representatives, it was clear that any subsequent theoretical program had to give weight to their views or, at any rate, be neutral in terms of theoretical guidelines for Inkhuk as a whole. Within Inkhuk, a small group of artists who called themselves The Workers' Group for Objective Analysis, tried to reach a compromise between the "pure artists" as represented by Kandinsky, and the productivists. The leader of this group, Aleksei Babichev, also a member of Presidium, drew up a program that the Presidium accepted as a working formula for all members of Inkhuk. In the draft to his program, Babichev noted that the task of art, like that of science, was "cognition and the organization of the object of cognition." His group's aim was "to uncover the methods of art, to find experimentally the method of analyzing the object of art and their medium." Only "strict objective signs," however, could lead to the science of art. While Babichev emphasized objective analysis, he also included the emotional, ethical and subjective factors or "causes" in art, which he called "secondary signs." Although these factors could be used in "the object of investigation," they could not be used "in the methods of investigation." Babichev then set forth the basic artistic assumptions of the group concerning the primacy of concrete expression of artistic forms and concepts and the vital importance of "deformation" in Art. 40 Babichev's program was by no means unfair to Kandinsky's views on the relationship between abstract artistic forms and psychic reactions; but since Babichev urged "the concrete expression of abstract concepts" and form and assigned them secondary importance in his

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program, Kandinsky naturally felt that his continued presence in the Institute could no longer serve any useful purpose if the majority of its members did not share his views on the orientation ot the Institute's research. He therefore resigned as its Chairman in December 1920 and began to teach in the newly reorganized workshops, The Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas - Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie); and in 1921, as the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences was established, Lunacharsky appointed him as its Vice-President and head of the Physical-Psychological department. In the latter half of 1922, Kandinsky left Russia to take a post in the Bauhaus in Germany. Kandinsky's departure from Inkhuk found Brik as its new elected Chairman and the productivists in control. This coincided with the reorganization of the free artistic workshops into Vkhutemas in December 1920, part of the reorganization of the Commissariat of Education as a whole. Lunacharsky, in collaboration with the Executive Committee of the Section of Fine Arts, whose members also belonged to Inkhuk—expecially Shterenberg, Brik, Punin and Altman—submitted a vague pedagogical plan, without any mention of disciplines, least of all of a political nature, to the Council of People's Commissars concerning the creation of Vkhutemas. They defined it as a "special artistic and higher-artistic industrial educational institution" for the preparation of "artists-craftsmen of higher qualification for industry." The Council approved the plan and sent it to Lenin for final approval. The lack of clarity in the pedagogical plan struck Lenin's keen attention and, before approving it on December 18, Lenin included the requirements that a deadline be set for its clarification—which the Section never met or complied with—and that political instruction in the fundamentals of communism be mandatory in all courses in Vkhutemas,41 Obviously, this political requirement was related to the Party statement of December 1, 1920 which attacked the Futurists (and Proletkult) for imparting perverted artistic tastes to the proletariat and for petty-bourgeois idealism alien to Marxism.42 There is no evidence, however, for any kind of political instruction in Vkhutemas. The educational program of Vkhutemas wholly preserved the freedom and autonomy of the student's artistic development that was characteristic of the free workshops, but it differed from them in two important respects. First, the aim of Vkhutemas was to provide students with an objective, scientific approach to artistic education—to objectify the processes, especially the "constructive" elements and

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principles of artistic creation in relation to industrial production. The application of this education was quite germane to the state of industrial production of the time. The beginning of 1921 saw a "catastrophic decline in industrial production" after three years of economic dislocation during the civil war or the revolutionary period; and in May 1921, a Party conference planned to strengthen "the production of objects of popular consumption and everyday peasant use"43 The educational plan of Vkhutemas did not exclude the pursuit of "pure painting." The first year of education consisted of basic courses in the Basic Division—dominated by members of which dealt with color, spatial, volume and graphic construction of materials from a functional perspective. After the student completed his first year, he was free to select his special subject in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, metallurgy, woodwork, textile and typography. The emphasis, however, was on preparing the student to become an artist-engineer or an engineer-artist, so as "to design practical objects for common use in industrial production. In contrast to the industrial designer he was not to be a formgiver only but an inventor, a constructor, the man who engineers the objects, not the one who designs them. And he had to differ from the engineer in his ability to unite function, construction, material and form in one indivisible, aesthetic whole.44 Second, Vkhutemas was not only a higher and intermediate educational institution; it also embraced the artistic education of children in secondary schools, including "work schools" (trudovye shkoly), and in clubs, cultural homes and other social institutions.45 Like the free workshops, Vkhutemas had no unified principle of artistic education, because each workshop developed its own principles, depending on the artistic orientation of its instructors beyond the Basic Division. Often there were collective methods of teaching, whereby instructors of opposing or similar artistic trends taught in the same workshop. Naum Gabo, one of the eminent artists who was connected with Inkhuk and Vkhutemas, provides a vivid description of the free atmosphere that prevailed in Vkhutemas: "What is important to know about the character of that institute is that is was almost an autonomous institution; it was both a school and a free academy where not only the current teaching of special professions was carried out but general discussions were held in open forums and seminars conducted amongst the students on diverse problems where the public could participate and artists not officially on the faculty could speak and give lessons. It had an audience of several thousand students . . . There was

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a free exchange between workshops. It was a matter of routine for the students of different professors to visit each other's workshops and also the private studios of the artists in an unofficial capacity such as mine. . . . During these seminars as well as during the general meetings, many ideological questions between opposing artists in our abstract group were thrashed out, and these gatherings had a much greater influence on the later development of constructive art than all the teaching. The topics of the meetings were usually concerned with what had been going on in the school and in private studios: technical questions, ideological problems, problems of the future destiny of art, general problems concerning art and life, and professional problems were discussed."46 If there were any guidelines for Vkhutemas, they were quite general in nature, often masked as a fear of one group or trend becoming dominant within Vkhutemas. Kandinsky, for example, wrote that "trends and styles" were not to be taught in Vkhutemas. The instructors' aim was to point the way and provide the means for the student, "but the discovery of purpose and the final result is the task of the individual personality." As for the "work schools," the aim of artistic education was to develop "activity in a child, to nurture the development of talent in a person, intellectual, technical and artistic. Contemporary pedagogy teaches that only with the richness of emotional life does intellectual work acquire a creative character."47 Kandinsky's fear, however, of the rise of a dominating artistic trend was rapidly becoming a reality. The coexistence within Vkhutemas of opposing artistic trends or ideologies eventually came to clash and inevitably led—as was the case with the free artistic workshops—to raging battles for the supremacy of an artistic ideology. These battles marked the history of Vkhutemas, and to a lesser extent of Inkhuk, which became its ideological parent, since most of the artists who taught in Vkhutemas were also members of Inkhuk.4* To this extent, the histories of both institutions are inseparable. The battle received its new spark in January 1921, when three artists, Konstantin Medunetsky and the brothers Vladimir and Georgy Stenberg, all members of Inkhuk and recent graduates of the free artistic workshops, held an exhibition of their spatial constructions in the Poets' Cafe in Moscow, and later in certain studios of Vkhutemas. They called themselves "Constructivists" in the catalogue of their exhibit, which also contained their manifesto of Constructivism as a cultural ideology that would lead "mankind to reach the maximum of cultural

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attainment with the minimum expenditure of energy." They mentioned the factory as the road to the development of a "universal culture," but "esthetes and artists had destroyed the bridges of that road by replaceing them with heaps of sweet anaesthesia - with art and beauty." 49 The short manifesto ended by "outlawing art and its priests" and reflected the makings of the ideology that came to be known as Constructivism—synonymous with productive art—and the official ideology of Inkhuk. A year later, Aleksei Gan, a graphic artist, published the official manifesto, "Constructivism," whose essential features consisted of "tectonics," "facture" and "construction," which Gan summarized as follows in terms of "mass action" (massovoe deistvie): "The planned development of the whole territorial area of a city, separate regions and, finally, the solution of the problem of space vertically, the tectonics of volume masses and the construction of buildings—this is the work of Constructivism that arose on the fresh soil of the proletarian revolution which is actively and consciously fighting for communism."50 The ideology of Constructivism had its origins in the productivist views of Brik, Proletkult, Mayakovsky and many other artists during the revolutionary years. In its simplest formulation, Constructivism, like productivism, meant the active, immediate and mass involvement of all forms of artistic expression in the creation of a communist culture—the penetration of art into almost every facet of daily life. If there is anything significantly new about Constructivism after 1921, it is the marked religious fervor with which it was espoused and pursued, the "epidemic" proportions it assumed,51 its militant utilitarianism and functionalism which resulted in a radical assault on "pure art", expecially easel painting, because it was seen as an obsolete remnant of bourgeois society, aimed only at "delighting and pleasing the eye," unrelated to industrial production and the effort to arouse cultural consciousness.52 More than this, Constructivism, in view of its truly ambitious mission, took the form of a political-cultural extension of, if not substitute for, Bolshevism itself. In 1922, Brik realized his notion of the "social commission" of art and the artist by forming links between Vkhutemas and "the centers of State economy and political education" for the "regular reception of orders for the fulfillment of practical artistic tasks."53 The Constructivists also saw themselves as "the universal advisors to the State on all problems relating to the material construction of the country."54 When Party membership was

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raised as a necessary condition for participating in "the struggle for communism," Brik replied that the struggle was "also the cause of all artists who are conscious of the path along which artistic culture is moving."55 The ideology of Constructivism, therefore, did not arise in a historical vacuum. It gained its stimulus and momentum from the Bolshevik revolution, its promise of the creation of a communist culture and of a rational, planned mass industrial society. Constructivism was thus a vital response to the specific social and cultural needs after 1921, especially for an art and literature of a "factual" nature, of "real" and "concrete" things. However radical as an ideology, Constructivism was more than germane to the artistic situation of "crisis" of the time as a manifestation of "realism"' because it provided artists with the opportunity to explore new directions and forms for artistic expression. According to Bowlt, "By late 1921 many artists were feeling that the exclusive concern with formal qualities was insufficient especially in a society oriented increasingly towards industrial organization and production, and their subsequent move into industrial design acted as an apparent resolution to the above problem."56 One member of Inkhuk, Elena Semyonova who abandoned her studies at Vkhutemas and "plunged with joy into practical work," remarks that "the demand [for social forms of art] was enormous."57 Pavel Mansurov, who was also associated with Inkhuk and who almost always remained within the realm of abstract art, wrote in 1923 that "via the severe system of Cubo-Futurism, our escape (from abstraction) is into Technology. Only Technology (Utilitarianism—Economy) is the motor of life."58 Constructivism was hardly "unproductive" in terms of artistic practice: it made impressive achievements in graphic, industrial and architectural design, in poster art, photography and typography.59 With regard to the extremism of Gan's manifesto, two scholars have suggested that it is somehow uncharacteristic of the Constructivist movement as a whole, and that "If one wishes to look for a more precise and reasoned explanation of Constructivism, one has to turn to the poets, such as Mayakovsky [?], the theorists Brik and Kushn e r . . .'60 It is true that Gan was a "doctrinaire fanatic," and personified "the extreme ideological nihilism of the entire avant-garde."61 But Gan's "nihilism," whether it means a destructive passion and/or the complete repudiation of authority and tradition, was intrinsic to almost all the political and "artistic" avant-garde movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including, of course, Bolshevism

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itself. If avant-garde extremism and "nihilism" have any single historical source, it is probably Marxism.62 In Russia, extremism and "nihilism" were intrinsic above all to Mayakovsky and his poem A Cloud in Trousers—"Over all that has been created I mark nihil"—and to the Russian Cubo-Futurist manifesto of 1912—A Slap in the Face of Public Taste—which called for the overthrow of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from "the ship of Modern Life." Gan's manifesto served an almost identical purpose—the overthrow of bourgeois art. Both manifestoes were essentially rebellious polemics against traditional artistic tastes and authorities and contained destructive passions that were deliberately designed to shock and thus draw attention to the movements. Significantly, however, the destructive tendencies in Gan's manifesto overshadowed its basic "constructive" orientation. One can only conjecture that the manifesto, one of the very few of its kind in the immediate post-revolutionary period, was also perhaps aimed at receiving official recognition or institutionalization from the Bolshevik regime—Brik's driving passion. But the manifesto's antagonism and extremism evoked a violent reaction in a period where conservative artistic tastes tended to prevail, as Rodchenko's memoirs clearly point out: We were rebelling against accepted canons, techniques, tastes and v a l u e s . . . We had a vision of a new World, industry, technology and science. We were inventors and transformers of the w o r l d . . . We created new concepts and broadened the concept of art itself. . . We were opposed because of our slogans 'Death to art, long live production!' We were taken to task for not recognizing 'pure art,' for being printers, photographers, designers of fabrics and shop displays—because we made graphic layouts for newspapers.63 As far as Brik is concerned, the extremism of Gan's manifesto does not alter the fact that Brik fully shared its views in his own writings and lectures. Several months before Gan's manifesto appeared, Brik wrote an article to define and resolve the "crisis" in art. He noted that there was a great deal of discussion about the crisis, about the artist's alienation from life, his "flight into transcendental realms, and that he must return to reality." A new audience with new artistic tastes and demands had emerged which old artistic forms could not satisfy. According to Brik, these were the symptoms of the crisis which was

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social in origin; and if art was to surmount the crisis, it was "precisely here in the social realm that one must seek its foundations." Brik went on to repeat his previous views on the role and function of art in bourgeois society, where art was "a product of artistic values," a selfcontained, free and autonomous activity; the artist was a "prophet of new worlds," the discoverer of the "essence of phenomena." Brik remarked that these artistic notions still prevailed in Russia, even though the Bolshevik revolution signified their end and the destruction of the culture from which they stemmed as a social necessity. The proletariat, however, would create new cultural forms which would provide the artist what bourgeois society had denied him: "the method of freely and consciously organizing life itself." The rise and growth of the proletariat and the consolidation of its organizational forms and methods would ensure art's survival of the crisis; and with the complete triumph of the proletariat, art as a "product of artistic values" would perish. Brik then posed the vital question: "Does this mean that artistic activity will disappear in general? Of course, not. Artistic activity, as the method of free and conscious creation, will be an indispensable form of every human activity. And all the experience and know-how, all the skills acquired by artistic work will prove useful in the possible way in the construction of proletarian life. Art is fused with practical life. This represents both its crisis and its resolution."64 These views are in complete accord with Gan's manifesto, despite its extremism and theoretical pretense. Brik also offered his own explanation of the Constructivist movement in terms of its aims, work and achievements. He saw Vkhutemas as the "breeding ground" of the movement, whose essential aim was the "application of all accumulated artistic craftsmanship for the creation of utilitarian products that are needed in everyday life." The Constructivists no longer worked for museums to fulfill "the demands of esthetes," but were fulfilling only productive orders for book covers, placards, furniture models, signs, banners, counters, including the painting of planes, automobiles and trains. Brik stressed that Constructivism was not to be confused with applied art, whose aim was to decorate ready-made things. The Constructivists dealt with "wellmade" things for a specific purpose, depending on "The concrete task and on productive conditions." Brik pointed out that the metal section of Vkhutemas, headed by Rodchenko, had assigned projects to its students such as "folding beds," "the bed-sofa," "the extension table" and other projects to which the "old-artists pedagogues" objected as

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"unartistic and suitable only to industrial school." Brik remarked that these objections would not deflect the Constructivists, because their projects were "necessary now, and that they are ready now to work in plants and factories, in the very thick of production." Although the products of the Constructivists were not achievements, they nevertheless represented significant first endeavors; and this indicated that art had transcended the narrow limits and tasks of easel painting. It was in the plants and factories that "the future material culture will be created." 65 Vkhutemas, however, became, as we have noted, a "breeding ground" in quite another sense: it spawned bitter disputes and battles between the Constructivists and the Realists,66 two diametrically opposed groups, over the educational program in Vkhutemas. Lenin himself was quite aware of the battles during a visit to a student hostel of Vkhutemas. He asked the students: "Well, What are you doing now at your school, fighting the futurists, I suppose? "But no, Vladimir Ilyich, we are all of us futurists." "Really! It would be interesting to have a discussion with you. But I won't have it now—you would have me defeated. I have not read enough on the subject as yet, but I will, I will. I really must have a discussion with you." "We will supply you with literature, Vladimir Ilyich. We are sure that you will become a a futurist too. You can't be on the side of the old rotten trash, especially since the futurists are at the moment the only group on our side . . ."67 In April 1921, Lunacharsky met with the Executive Committee of the Section of Fine Arts, which now consisted mostly of new members, but Shterenberg and Altman still remained on the Committee as representatives of the Constructivists. The purpose of the meeting was to review the educational program of Vkhutemas on the insistence of one of its students, S. Bogdanov, who headed a Realist group of artists and who had sent a letter to the Central Commitee of the Party in December 1920 to complain of widespread discontent with the unobjective, Cubist and perverted artistic-educational program of the Section of Fine Arts.68 The meeting led to the formation of a special commission to study Vkhutemas; and the commission's members included Shterenberg, Altman, S. Bogdanov, the Futurist art student S. Senkin and

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a Realist art instructor K. Yuon. Lunacharsky suggested that Bogdanov submit his program for the commission's consideration, but since this never came forth, the task was left to Yuon. When he submitted his program, he suggested a return to "a classical form of artistic education" in Vkhutemas, by which all students would first study the techniques of painting. But Lunacharsky found Yuon's program wanting, and drew up his own program which stressed the analytic and synthetic study of artistic forms and methods. Lunacharsky's program also contained a special clause for Bogdanov's group to move into their own workshops without having to study under the Constructivists in the Basic Division of Vkhutemas. After Lunacharsky's program was discussed, during which Shterenberg and Altman were "usually silent," the commission approved the plan.69 Rodchenko, Malevich and A. Lentulov, however, refused to accept Lunacharsky's plan because they claimed that their views were not represented in the commission. The commission met again, at which time about twenty art instructors of opposing trends were present. Lentulov spoke against Lunacharsky's program and protested the clause concerning Bogdanov's group. Lunacharsky suggested that the "left" instructors, i. e. the Constructivists, submit their own plan, but they never did, and thus Bogdanov's efforts "remained on paper." 70 On June 21, 1921 Bogdanov sent a letter to Lenin in which he charged that the Futurists were "suppressing" other artistic groups, "had placed other artists in a hopeless situation" because of their own "material-privileged situation," and that they were striving "in a purely coercive way to cultivate futurist and non-objective art." Bogdanov requested that another commission be formed "for the final resolution of the problem of realizing the organized plan of the State School of Fine Arts, on which the organized commission had worked for more than six months."71 When Lunacharsky received his copy of Bogdanov's letter, he wrote a letter to Lenin to note the complex problems of maintaining an "objective school" in view of the struggles between the opposing artistic groups. He then concluded his letter: "Starting with the fall season, we will in any event satisfy the most important demands of the artists-realists and will review in the most thorough way also the general procedures of the artistic workshops. The information that Bogdanov has provided is utterly and outrageously exaggerated and tendentious. During this time I have come to learn not be believe a single word of artists when they speak of each other." 72

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Lenin, however, formed a new commission to investigate Vkhutemas and to report to the Council of People's Commissars. After the report was presented, the Council sent a directive to Lunacharsky "to undertake urgent measures for the reorganization of higher artistic education, with the assurance in the first place of the opportunity for the artistic development of realist trends in art and sculpture."73 The regime's preference for realism in art now became a firm commitment. But the Council's directive had no effect. The fall season saw no change in the educational program of Vkhutemas. New conflicts arose for Lunacharsky to resolve between the Constructivists and Realists; and it seems that the best that Lunacharsky could do was to exhort artists and students in Vkhutemas "to exert all efforts to cease any internal struggle and to adjust to fruitful work."74 But the struggle took external forms, too, as the Realists organized in May 1922 The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia for concerted efforts against the Constructivists in the press, public debates and art exhibits which, when combined with the covert political pressure against the Constructivists, led to the gradual control of the Realists in Vkhutemas. In 1924, Brik, on behalf of several members of Inkhuk, bitterly and caustically documented the ideological and organizational disintegration of Vkhutemas as an accomplished fact. Vkhutemas was no longer fulfilling the ideological and practical tasks of the day and of the future proletarian culture. The productivist departments were empty and the machines used in them had been either sold or rented. The painting and sculptural workshops for mediocre artists had expanded "magnificently" and the "purists" were wholly in control of the Basic Division, where there was no mention of productive or social tasks—placards, caricatures, social satire and grotesque depictions of everyday life. The meager sums that had been allocated for Vkhutemas were now being used to support the "parasitic," ideologically harmful and artistically backward "purists," who painted landscapes, still life and nude models. Pedagogically, Vkhutemas had reverted to pre-revolutionary methods of painting, modelling and stylization, with a new emphasis on the "mystical interpretation of artistic laws practiced by a small group of artists-mystics with the priest Florensky as its head." Vkhutemas had broken all ties with economic, political, industrial and publishing organizations and other social consumers of art, and was now satisfying the demands of the petty-bourgeoisie and tenants for crude pictures, ringlets and satin-stitched embroidery. This turn of events signified for Brik the destruction of "all the achievements of the proletarian revolu-

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tion in the realm of artistic ideology, artistic labor and pedagogy." Brik demanded the reaffirmation of productivist notions in Vkhutemas and the removal of the "purists" in the struggle against artistic reaction. He appealed to all who were concerned with the fate of proletarian culture in the struggle, but his appeal was a cry in the wilderness.7-5 The gradual removal of the Constructivists from Vkhutemas sealed, to a certain extent, the fate of Inkhuk as an ideological parent. The activities of Inkhuk are undoubtedly the subject of a large volume when archival materials become accessible. Here we can only briefly describe, according to published sources, Inkhuk's activities, their significance and essential forms. After Brik was elected Chairman of Inkhuk, he began to establish links with the Proletkult artistic studios so that members of Inkhuk would provide regular instruction in them on the principles of productive art. These links met with Lunacharsky's approval, since he, according to Brik, was convinced that "productive art is the art of the future." 76 Within the Commissariat of Education, the Department of Artistic Education committed itself at a conference to the instruction of productive art in schools. Brik also made ties with various workers' unions, cultural clubs, industrial, agricultural and economic organizations so as to promote the aims and ideas of Inkhuk. From its center in Moscow, Inkhuk spread to St. Petersburg, where Tatlin became its head in 1921. Malevich established an Inkhuk center in Vitesbsk in the same year. Significantly, Inkhuk gained academic status in January 1922 when it came under the administrative control of the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences as "A united association of masters of left art, standing wholly on a productive platform." 77 Beyond Russia, Inkhuk established ties with artists, artistic organizations, publishing houses, and technological and scientific societies in France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Sweden, Austria, Japan and China. In Paris, ties were made with Le Corbusier's journal, L'Esprit Nouveau, and in Vienna with the journal Eguseg. In Berlin, El Lissitzky began to publish in 1922 the journal Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet.1% Various members of Inkhuk, especially Brik, Shterenberg and Altman, frequently travelled to West European capitals to further Inkhuk's ties and to speak on the principles of Constructivist art. These trips also provided Russian artists with information on the course of artistic development in the West after seven years of Russia's artistic isolation from it. In 1922, Inkhuk played a key role in exhibiting Suprematist and Constructivist art at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin, and later in

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Amsterdam, London and Paris. In 1923, exhibits of Inkhuk's theatrical designs toured France and Germany, and a year later they were held in Venice and Vienna. The militant assault on easel painting and "pure forms of art" did not make Inkhuk a monolithic organization—far from it. In fact, the debate on the relevance of easel painting continued unabated within Inkhuk. It is true that the artists Korolyov Klyun, Drevin and Udaltsova abandoned Inkhuk on that issue; but the overwhelming majority of Inkhuk's members were committed to productive art only in principle.79 Inkhuk was a veritable hotbed of theoretical discussion and debate over a wide range of problems concerning art in a broad sense, productive art and the sociology of art. The following incomplete list of papers presented to Inkhuk clearly demonstrates the diversity of the approach to artistic problems (by author, topic, and date of presentation):80 El Lissitzky, "Prouny" ("Proyekty utverzhdeniya novogo:" "Projects for the Affirmation of the New"), September 23, 1921 I. Ilin, "The Politics of the RSFSR in the Realm of Art, " November 17,1921 A. Kemeny, "Modern Trends in Contemporary German and Russian Art," December 8, 1921 "On the Constructivist Works of the Society of Young Artists," December 26, 1921 F. Malevin, "The Initial Task," December 21, 1921 A. Toporkov, "On the Dialectical and Analytical Method in Art," February 22, 1922 G. Borisov, "An Analysis of the Concept of Object in Art," March 23, 1922 "The Rhythmic System of Space," no date V. Krinsky, "The Paths of Architecture," no date N. Tarabukin, "The Last Picture Has Been Painted," August 21,1921 O. Brik, "The Artistic Tasks of Inkhuk" October 12, 1921 "The Program and Tactics of Inkhuk," October 12, 1921 "What Artists Must Do Now," April 13, 1922 B. Arvatov, "Art from an Organizational Viewpoint," October 1921 B. Kushner, "The Production of Culture," March 9, 1922, March 16, 1922 "The Role of the Engineer in Production," March 30, 1922 "The Artist in Production," April 6, 1922

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V. Stepanova, "On Constructivism," December 22, 1921 "Today's Clothing," 1923 "On the Status and the Tasks of the Artist-Constructivist in the Textile Print Industry in Connection with Work in the First Print Industry," no date A. Babichev, "Problems in the Analysis of Formal Elements in Contemporary Art," no date "The Program of Inkhuk's Activities," no date "The Elements of Sculpture and Their Functional Dependence," no date "The Forms of Contemporary Life in Connection with the Problem of Volume," no date "On Inkhuk's Relations with the Academy of Artistic Sciences," no date Besides these papers, the Pedagogical Section of Inkhuk, which was directly linked with Vkhutemas, periodically gave reports on teaching methods and the general progress of productive art in Vkhutemas. Popova and Altman, among others, reported on their theatrical designs for stage productions. Inkhuk also "commissioned" a number of articles on specific topics by Arvatov, Popova, Vesnin and others. All these papers, reports and articles only cover Inkhuk's activities up to the beginning of 1923, when the Information Section of Inkhuk published an account of its work. Inkhuk planned to publish a large volume of articles by all its members, including five other monographs, but it could not obtain the funds to do so. In 1923, however, Mayakovsky and Brik succeeded in obtaining their own journal, Lef—The Left Front of Arts—which published the works of the Futurist poets, Constructivists and members of Opoyaz (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language); and despite the fact that Mayakovsky was the Chief Editor of Lef this journal should be considered Inkhuk's; for it is only after the dissolution of Inkhuk that Lef became a Futurist-Formalist journal, especially after 1924. Inkhuk also organized numerous exhibits of the works of the Constructivists. In May 1921, The Society of Young Artists (Obmokhu—Obshchestvo molodykh khudozhnikov) exhibited the works of Medunetsky, Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers. In September 1921, Exter, Popova, Rodchenko, Stepanova and Vesnin each contributed five works for the " 5 X 5 = 25" exhibit in Moscow. In June 1923, Exter, Popova, Rodchenko, Stepanova and Yakulov exhibited their works for the "Theatrical-Decorative Art of Moscow 1918-1923." In

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October 1923, The Society of Young Artists held its fourth exhibition in Moscow under Inkhuk's auspices. In May 1924, the Constructivists contributed many works for the "First Discussional Exhibition of Associations of Active Revolutionary Art" in Moscow.82 The laboratory experiments of the Constructivists, architectonic paintings, architectural models of schools, palaces of culture, kiosks, workers' clubs, libraries, department stores, stadiums, dormitories, apartment buildings, museums and other buildings, industrial and theatrical designs, agit-art—these were displayed and discussed within Inkhuk. The laboratory experiments emphasized the "culture of materials;" the architectural models focused on the dynamics of linear and spatial construction and were intended, as it were, to bring the inevitable future of communist culture to the present, as though the future actually existed in the "present;" and it is this futurist, Utopian aspiration that is a marked religious feature of Constructivist mentality. By the beginning of 1924, Inkhuk no longer existed as a state-supported artistic organization dedicated to the creation of a communist culture, despite its passionate and unswerving support of the Bolshevik regime. Sarabyanov rightly points out that the four or so years of Inkhuk's existence "surpass several decades" in terms of the scope and significance of its work.83 The history of the twentieth-century perhaps knows of no other artistic organization which was so dynamically creative in artistic achievements and formal explorations and which so remarkably anticipated many of the basic contours of modern art, architecture and industrial design.84 The problem of why Inkhuk ceased to exist organizationally is complex, partly due to the lack of sufficient data, but some tentative conclusions are possible. Zhadova notes that Inkhuk's ideas clashed with reality because of their Utopian character. She adds that Inkhuk "wanted to create a new type of artistic activity and a new culture before their economic foundations had been established, before the cultural level of the half-literate people's masses had been raised. All of [Inkhuk's] conceptions arose in the name of the man of future society, and although he was . . . far from a concrete phenomenon, an abstract social category, this premise was historically justified."85 Moreover, by the middle of 1923, Inkhuk's theoretical and practical activities had flourished to such an extent that they tended to eclipse much of the work of the Academy of Artistic Sciences and almost assumed the status of an "academy" in themselves. Inkhuk's projected plans for better and closer ties with industrial organizations, among other am-

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bitious plans, transcended the scope of the Academy's administrative and artistic jurisdiction and could not be realized within it.86 At this point, Brik requested from the Academy that Inkhuk become an autonomous organization, independent of the Academy, and be renamed Ind.uk (Institut industrialnoi kultury—The Institute for Industrial Culture). Zhadova notes that Inkhuk's relations with the Academy were "rather complicated," and since Inkhuk was unable "to determine its organizational forms within the framework of the Academy, it ceased to function in practice."87 In September 1923, after his request had been made, Brik was in Berlin (with Lily) to establish ties with the Bauhaus. From Moscow, Mayakovsky wrote a letter to Lily to remark: "Tell Osik [Brik] that they are giving Inkhuk quite a scutching and there is no one to defend it. Babichev [Brik's Deputy Chairman] is ill and in the Crimea."88 On the basis of this evidence and of the preceding account, one can gain some understanding of the factors that led to Inkhuk's cessation of activity until additional evidence becomes available. After Inkhuk ceased to exist, Brik focused his efforts on making the Futurist journal Lef the new forum for artists, poets and Formalist critics. Like Inkhuk, Lef hat no "unified program" either in theory or practice. As Brik noted, Lef was "a group of 'free agents'... close to each other in the understanding of the tasks of literature and art, who could meet, argue and publish their works."89

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The cessation of Inkhuk, however, could hardly efface the decisive impact of Constructivist ideology, especially in its more utilitarian forms, on the art world of the time and even as far as the early nineteen-thirties. A significant measure of that impact can be clearly seen in Fyodor Gladkov's letter to Maksim Gorky in 1927, in which he remarked that "Utilitarianism in art has not been eliminated to the present time, and the Futurists still exert an enormous influence on young artists."1 Brik was determined to make the Constructivist impact ineradicable and to extend utilitarianism, with a strong Formalist literary orientation, to other art forms: photography, film, poetry, and (later) literature. In Lef, Brik mounted a new and vigorous assault on easel painting, utterly convinced of its historical and technical irrelevance in view of the failure of easel painters, many of whom accepted the idea of productive art, "to apply their knowledge and skills in production." Brik wanted "the entire mass of artistic youth to understand" that the fusion of art with productions was "the only true path, that it is precisely along this path that the development of artistic culture will proceed;" and once "economic planners" grasped their own role in that cause, the historical process of artistic culture would be accelerated.2 As photography assumed increasing importance in Russia, Brik immediately seized on it not as a "dead" and "soulless mechanism," or a "blind copy of reality," or the ally of painting, but as a living instrument for the representation and transformation of reality through photomontage, through "the fixation of fact." Brik seemed to regard photography as a function or adjunct of literature, a literature devoid of language, which evoked in the viewer a kind of "internal" language, in the sense that it was a perceptual-intellectual activity. The purpose of photography was to transform reality into a "literary fact." Brik

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claimed that, if the painter portrayed reality "in his own way," in images through "the prism of his soul," then that "artistic reality" was no longer perceptually effective historically because social and political conditions since 1917 demanded "real facts" and documents "to depict life in all its squalor." "We need facts so as to know life, so as to analyze it and master it, so as to bring our action to bear on it." What Brik suggested was the photographic representation of "real" reality so as to arouse a new perception or consciousness of what ought to be changed, with a view to enlisting the viewer's participation in that change. Brik reminded the critics of photography that it was man, not the camera, who shaped the representation of reality in photography, not mechanically, but creatively; and what mattered in the representation was not so much reality itself, but the "what" and the perspective. Like literature, Brik saw photography as a craft, a style, method, technique and projected vision. Brik did not point out whether a fragment of reality, however creative photographically, was in itself a distortion or an "estrangement" (ostranenie) of reality. Perhaps he would have replied that the "estrangement" of reality was precisely what was central to a new perception of, and identity with, that reality. For Brik the aim of photography was not to resemble or compete with a painting, but "to fix on a significant f a c t . . . in such a way that its significance is shown vividly, strikingly," in a self-contained way. Brik thus saw photography as a superior expression of realism and the rival of painting, which could no longer arouse the will or the consciousness to change reality because of its "unreal" and artistically distorted representation of reality.3 Brik applied the same criterion of factual and documentary realism to the film because the photographic camera and the film camera were to him functionally related. He consistently advocated in the press the production of documentaries and chronicles of daily life in which the "activism" of men would play the paramount role. Brik firmly believed that the film could not revert to the literature of the past, to its peripetia of personal existence because the correlations between personal and social-political life had changed radically since the Bolshevik revolution, which marked the end of man's passive contemplation of life. For this reason he opposed psychological drama and psychological realism because they were a passive representation of pre-revolutionary life and because they did not represent So viet man in activity and in conflict with his social environment.4 In 1926, when the film had already become extremely popular with

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the masses, Brik (and Boris Malkin) began to work for the International Labor Relief—Russia (Mezhrabpom—Rus) film studio as Director of its literary division. This film studio was the leading free-enterprise film producer of the day; it focused on the production of commercial films with a realistic, non-documentary, psychological orientation for entertainment purposes. Financially, it was extraordinarily successful in comparison with Eisenstein's and Dziga Vertov's technical experiments in montage. Critics in Lef frequently attacked the productions and directors of Mezhrabpom for its commercialism and lack of documentaries. Brik joined the film studio so as to direct it to documentary and non-commercial film projects, which had little mass appeal at the time. After working in the studio for a year, Brik sadly noted that he, too, had been compelled to work on films for entertainment, and that ninety-nine percent of the film productions dealt with entertainment. He attributed this state of affairs not to the production department of the studio, but "to the general level of culture in the country." He still considered it necessary to struggle for the film-chronicle of daily life. His publicistic work alone could not change the situation. It was necessary to persuade the production departments that there was no fundamental opposition and contradiction between the film-chronicle and the entertainment film because they both served identical purposes.5 As for poetry, Brik saw no reason why it should not be used for agitational and publicistic purposes, for promoting the products of various economic organizations. Brik suggested that this kind of work was a new technical challenge to poets and the penetration of poetry into daily life. Earlier, in 1922, Brik had remarked that such poetry, written with the maximum of creative ingenuity, was a valid and genuine art form, and hardly a profanation of poetry.6 Objections to such poetry were "very stupid idealism," because, Brik believed, every poet "wrote according to the demands of someone." Brik pointed to the poets Mayakovsky,7 Tretyakov and Nikolai Aseev, who wrote poetry for the state as their "client," thus fulfilling the "social commission" of poetry. As a theoretician of poetry, Brik observed that poetry for agitational and publicistic purposes, in view of its semantic and rhythmic-sound organization, would be much easier to remember than prose; and since laws, proverbs and sayings were widely used poetically in daily life, poeticized epigraphs and quotations for political and economic purposes were an integral part of any literary work. The criteria for the effectiveness of such poetry were a function of wit and

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technical devices, for poetry was above all a craft: striking word forms and combinations, the play with imagery, meanings, synonyms and rhymes. Brik asserted that this kind of poetry was more difficult to "produce" than lyric poems on "roses and reveries." He went on to note that Lenin's highly positive response to Mayakovsky's poem, "Those Consumed by Conference" ("Prozasedavshiesya") was a prime example of the technical effectiveness of agitational and satirical poetry. Lenin said of Mayakovsky's poem in 1922: "Yesterday I happened to read in Izvestiya Mayakovsky's poem on a political theme. I am not one of those who admire his poetic talent, although I fully recognize my own incompetence in such matters. But for a long time I haven't felt such satisfaction and pleasure from a political and administrative perspective. In his poem he absolutely derides conferences and makes a mockery of our communists who continually hold conferences and more conferences. I'm not sure of the poetic aspect, but politically I guarantee you that it's wholly correct." Brik commented that despite the fact that the theme of endless conferences of bureaucrats had been raised "thousands of times" in the press and in political speeches, the skillful technical elaboration of that theme in poetry was a source of great satisfaction to Lenin; and his positive response to Mayakovsky's poem only confirmed the striking effect that agitational and publicistic poetry could produce in renewing perception of political problems and in promoting economic products as well.8 Before discussing Brik's views on literature, it is necessary to provide a context for understanding them. The early 1920's saw the gradual revival of literature and the rise of literary groups, essentially three, which came to dominate the literary scene during the 1920's. In certain ways, the literary scene reenacted the ideological struggles between artistic groups during the revolutionary years for Party recognition, especially between Proletkult and the Futurists. Just as the Party resisted the efforts of those groups to act as its official spokesman, it also refused to commit itself to any literary group. The Party actively encouraged the development of diverse literary groups and tendencies because it did not believe that a "proletarian" literature could be created during the "transitional" period of communism. It did hope, however, that a "proletarian" literature would somehow evolve from those diverse literary tendencies. Formal innovation was also encouraged or, at any rate, was not discouraged; and so long as writers avoided open criticism of the regime and the revolution, they were given considerable latitude in their choice of themes for literary treat-

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ment. The Party's liberal literary policy, however, was not without contradictions and problems. The first and most promising literary group was the so-called FellowTravellers, a diverse group of non-communist or bourgeois writers whom the regime hoped to attract and win over to the revolution by creating in 1921 the literary journal, Red Virgin Soil, in which they could publish their works under attractive circumstances. The Party conceived this journal as a "united front of literary forces," both non-Communist and Communist.10 Its editor was a perceptive literary critic, Aleksandr Voronsky, a Trotskyist who fully shared the literary views of the Bolshevik leaders concerning the necessity of drawing on the best "realistic" traditions of ninteenth-century Russian literature and other literatures as the basis for a "proletarian" literature. This was the fundamental precondition for the growth and development of that literature. As for his literary views, Voronsky saw in literature the revelation of universal human experiences and aspirations, a mode of objective knowledge of reality—"cognition of life"—which the novelist expressed in "sensible images" and "immediate impressions." Voronsky also stressed the role of intuition and the sub-conscious in the creative process. The second group, the Octobrists, consisted of proletarian writers who formed their own journal, On Guard, in 1923. The Octobrists were a militant, dogmatic and intolerant group that demanded the absolute expression of a proletarian or communist ideology in literature, with little, if any, concern for its formal quality and value. Like Proletkult, the Octobrists considered themselves the rightful spokesman of the Party in literary affairs. They were not so much interested in literature as in literary hegemony (especially their leader). The Party was hardly in a position to discourage the Octobrists once they had raised the banner of communist ideology and the class struggle in literature—critical ingredients in the making of a "proletarian" literature. But the Party did resist the persistent efforts and claims of the Octobrists to speak and act on its behalf during most of the 1920's. The constant target of attack for the Octobrists was Voronsky and the Fellow-Travellers, the class enemies who deserved to be repressed because of their petty-bourgeois origins, and who represented the only formidable obstacle to the Octobrists in their bid for control of the literary world. It is largely the Octobrists who were responsible for the fierce and unedifying literary debates that raged during the 1920's. The leader of the Octobrists was Leopold Averbakh, an ambitious

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political opportunist who had considerable experience as a journalist as the editor of the Komsomol journal, Young Guard. He was also related to two high Party officials, Emelyan Yaroslavsky and Yakov Sverdlov, and used his Party connection effectively. Averbakh became aware that after the "transitional" period of communism the Party would eventually adopt a specific style and/or method in literature, or commit itself to a specific literary group for leadership. Averbakh thus actively and somewhat fanatically sought to make a career for himself in the literary world. If Averbakh had a "literary" program or theory, it was curiously similar to Voronsky's literary views, with the addition of a number of high-sounding slogans which Averbakh saw as the prescription for the development of a "proletarian" literature: "Study the Classics" (particularly Tolstoy's psychological realism); "Tear Off the Masks", (exposing the class enemies and the capitalist traditions); "For the Living Man" (the emphasis on psychic processes in literary portrayal).11 The third group was the Futurists, the so-called "Lefists," as they were called after 1923, who "exerted an influence in the 1920's out of all proportion to its small numbers."12 The Futurists were a loose, independent but pro-communist coalition of Futurist poets, theoreticians, Consctructivists, writers and Formalist scholars of Opoyaz who were oriented toward formal innovation in, and inquiry into, the arts as a whole and who, like Voronsky and Averbakh, "sincerely sought to help in the construction of a new, Soviet society."13 Unlike Voronsky and Averbakh, however, the Futurists believed that the art and literature of the past had no relevance to the special "artistic" problems that flowed from the Bolshevik revolution and its aims. True to the original character of the Futurist movement, the Futurists published in Lef clamorous manifestoes and programmatic statements that called for battle on many fronts in their struggle for an art of "building life" (zhiznestroenie): "To Explode the Old" "To Encompass a New Culture," "To Agitate the Masses with [Futurist] Art." More importantly, the Futurists saw literature not as a function of ideology, but as a function of devices and techniques; and they considered themselves the educators of the proletariat in the craft of literature. As Brik defined the purpose of the Formalist scholars: "Opoyaz will help proletarian art not by vague discussions about the new 'proletarian spirit' and 'communist consciousness,' but by precise technical knowledge of the devices of contemporary poetic craft." 14 But the Futurists were not without serious difficulties after 1923. The years of their supremacy were over and the beginning of their end

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had already set in, despite their utter determination to fight to the very end for their place in Russian literature and art. The possibility of any form of Party recognition of the Futurists was completely out of the question after the turbulent experiences of the revolutionary years. The Futurists knew this painfully, but could not and would not renounce their offensive tactics, for to do so would have meant the end of their existence as Futurists. To that extent, they were the prisoners of their own past. The Futurists were, put mildly, the least favored of the literary groups from the Party's point of view, expecially for their scornful and "nihilistic" attitude toward the "bourgeois" literature of the past as textbooks for study, not imitation, and for their emphasis not on communist ideology and the class struggle in literature, but on formal innovation and technique as its central criteria. Besides the loud and polemical statements that appeared in the very first issue of Lef, Brik made his first, sudden venture into imaginative prose by writing a highly suggestive short story, "She's Not a FellowTraveller" ("Nepoputchitsa")}5 It contained thirty "threaded" but shifting scenes similar, as Brown rightly notes, to a "movie scenario in its total emphasis on action and dialogue."16 In the work, Brik depicts a corrupt and ideologically confused Party bureaucracy in pursuit of bourgeois pleasures and comforts. The key bureaucrat in the story is Sandarov, who is disaffected from his secretary-wife. Sandarov is "sick and tired of Party meetings" and spends a great deal of time seeking, under the identity of Tumin (i. e. the "Foggy One" as suggested by the Russian word tumari), the affections of a frivolous and beautiful woman, the wife of a petty-bourgeois entrepreneur who is indirectly involved, with Sandarov, in a scheme to swindle the state for a fictitious work project. Brik seemingly tempered his criticism of the Party bureaucracy by showing the indispensable intervention of the Cheka in the case to expose the swindle. The Cheka penetrates the peronal motives of those who informed on Sandarov: his secretary-wife and a Party functionary who investigated the case maliciously. In the end, Sandarov and the Party functionary are exiled to Siberia and the Urals, respectively. Brik's story raises a compelling question: what did Brik want to say in the story that he could not or feared to say as a publicist? His story seems to point to the conclusion that "bourgeois" habits were entrenched in the Party bureaucracy, and that the practice of denouncing and informing on others had become a sinister way of settling personal grievances against others, and thus made the Cheka a permanent

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feature of political life. That practice also inhibited free and open discussion within the Party and adversely affected human relationships.17 The story also strongly suggests that the NEP period, with its pervasive Philistinism, marked a betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Party bureaucrats and leaders began to attack the Futurists after the first issue of Lef was published. Trotsky, for example, perceptively grasped the subtle meaning of Brik's story as "an almost Communist 'change'." "The trouble," Trotsky continued, "does not lie in the fact that the Communists are not pictured here sweet as sugar or hard as steel, but in the fact that between the author and the vulgar environment which he describes, there isn't an inch of perspective." But Brik's perspective of the "vulgar environment" was surely penetrating and prophetic; and it could not have been gained by Trotsky's false analogy between a "revolutionist" and an "artist." Trotsky added, in relation to Brik's story: "But for art to be able to transform as well as to reflect, there must be a great distance between the artist and life, just as there is between the revolutionist and political reality."18 Trotsky also regarded the Futurists as "Bohemian nihilists" who eviscerated poetry with "trans-rational" language, and the Formalists were "reactionary," although Trotsky admitted that their notions of art's role in shaping, not reflecting, life, of "the development of language and systematic formation of words" were "extremely significant from the point of view of building a Socialist culture."19 Lunacharsky's assessment of the Futurists was more critical, although by no means entirely negative. With his typical ambivalence, Lunacharsky saw Futurism and Formalism as "products of bourgeois decadence," and both these diseases had also infected the talented Mayakovsky."20 Lunacharsky noted that, because the Futurists "could not organize the feelings and thoughts of the proletariat" in their art, they advocated, especially Brik, "the extremely harmful" idea of the "social commission" of art and literature. Lunacharsky added, however, that the Futurists were undoubtedly a talented group; and once they abandoned their noisy tactics and contempt for ideology, they could contribute significantly to the development of proletarian literature.21 The Party's attitude towards the Futurists, therefore, was at best one of suspicious tolerance. The "external" survival of the Futurists as a group rested on Lenin's approval of Mayakovsky's poetry, Mayakovsky's immense popularity and poetic-political service to the regime, and the Party's liberal policy towards diverse literary and art groups.

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The beginning of 1925, however, found the Futurists torn by open internal dispute and in a state of crisis. One of the key theoreticians of Lef, Nikolai Chuzhak, with the strong backing of the Odessa Futurists, called for a conference of the "left workers of art" to come to grips with the internal crisis, where he posed a formidable challenge to Mayakovsky's and Brik's leadership of the Futurist movement. Chuzhak began the debate with a stinging attack on Brik's notions of "productive art," for his "crude mistakes" which "vulgarized the left movement" and which made it vulnerable to "well-founded attacks." Chuzhak did not disagree with Brik's notions, but he asserted that Brik had couched them in "absolute" terms by making, for example, "a fetish of calico-printers." After criticizing Gan, Rodchenko and other Constructivists, Chuzhak ridiculed Mayakovsky for "turning his soul inside out" in the pages of Lef, which contradicted the basic principles of "productive art" and the Futurist movement as a whole. Chuzhak took Mayakovsky to task for his "lyric complaints and digressions" about tragic love and the hum-drum of daily life in his poem "About That" ("Pro eto").22 This signified for Chuzhak that Mayakovsky could not transcend the pre-revolutionary mold of his poetry and thus removed himself from the task of changing that life.23 What was Chuzhak's antidote? He wanted "the unity of theory and practice" in Lef and an end to the pre-revolutionary Futurist tactics which Maykovsky and Brik carelessly flaunted in Lef to the detriment of the Futurist movement. "Enough of general slogans: we need clear, precise and concrete expression of the artistic tasks for Lef in the coming days." But all that Chuzhak could really offer was another lofty slogan: "artistic materialism," which in terms of its definition was identical to Brik's earlier notions: "the concrete solution of concrete tasks," "art as a product for the needs of the revolutionary moment," and the "Maximum penetration [of art] into real life." Chuzhak then went on to demand "complete agreement on all questions" and "precise formulas for all our work."24 In his rather conciliatory response to Chuzhak's attack, Brik remarked that Chuzhak's demands could not be imposed on a diverse group of artists. The concept of "left front" was entirely relative, and the "variations" in the Futurist movement, which distressed Chuzhak, were quite appropriate so as to preserve its artistic autonomy and diversity. Everyone could agree, Brik continued, that the basic work of each Futurist consisted in fulfilling a "social commission," and not in "self-exposure" (samo-vyyavlenie). Brik suggested the creation of

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a special technical bureau that would coordinate the activities of the Futurists in the cities and provinces and answer their questions and inquiries.25 As for Mayakovsky, he categorically rejected the notion of a "monolithic organization" of Futurists, and suggested that two principles govern their activities: (1) "a federative union with absolute freedom of associations," and (2) "a solid material basis," with an apparent view to some compromise with Chuzhak. But the dogmatic Chuzhak would not compromise and abandoned the Futurist movement, thus creating a split within it. Shortly after the conference ended, Maykovsky tried unsuccessfully to persuade Chuzhak to reconsider his position: "Remember that the aim of our alliance is communist art... a sphere which does not lend itself yet to precise definition or theorizing; a sphere where practice, intuition are way ahead of the most imaginative theoretician. Let us work together on this, without imposing anything on each other, possible by perfecting each other, you with your knowledge, we with our taste."26 The split within the Futurist movement, however, was compounded by another crisis: the circulation of Le/had plunged from five-thousand copies in 1923 to fifteen-hundred in 1924. This led to heavy financial losses; and since it was an independent journal, Gosizdat refused to subsidize the losses.27 Brik offered an explanation of the "paradoxical" problem: "The more the mass readers admired Mayakovsky's poetry, the less interest they had in the journal that he edited."28 The seventh and final issue of Lef was published shortly after the conference. If Mayakovsky and Brik drew any lesson from the Lefe.pisode, it was that the Futurists, in order to survive in a period of increasing political regimentation that had already affected the arts, had to wage a "unified" struggle against its literary opponents, especially the Octobrists; and this struggle found its expression two years later in Brik's theory of the "literature of fact." In early March 1925, approximately a month after Lef ceased publication, Brik and three poets associated with the Futurists—Nikolai Aseev, Boris Paternak, Ilya Selvinsky—called upon Trotsky to complain that they were unable to publish their works because other journals accepted only "popular literature" (massovaya literatura) and rejected "experimental" works. Thereafter Trotsky held a meeting between them and four of his political "supporters"—Voronsky, Vyacheslav Polonsky, N. Osinsky, Abram Lezhnev—who were editors and journalists.29 Nothing conclusive, it seems, emerged

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from the meeting. Neither Voronsky nor Polonsky—the politically ambitious editor of Press and Revolution and an outspoken critic of the Futurists—was enthusiastic, to say the least, to publish the works of the Futurists in their journals. Certainly Brik was quite aware of this. Why, then, did he seek the help of Trotsky, whose political power had been undermined and who was under constant attack in the Party press, of which he was also aware? It may be that Brik's real intent was to exploit the meeting in the hope of gaining another Futurist journal. In June 1925, the Party issued an official statement of literary policy which reflected a significant modification of its previous policy of neutrality in literary matters and revealed its intention to intervene actively and decisively in the immediate future to create a "proletarian" literature of "dialectical materialism."30 While the Party claimed that it would not at the moment commit itself to any specific literary form or any literary group, specifically the Octobrists, it strongly implied that the Octobrist group would ultimately achieve a position of literary hegemony as its "historic right." The Party emphatically added that there could be no "neutral" literature "in a class society," with the implication that communist ideology would be of supreme importance in literature. As for the Fellow-Travellers, the Party noted that it would pursue "an approach that will assure them the conditions for as quick as possible a change of allegiance in the direction of communist ideology." This remark probably applied to the Futurists as well, although they were not specifically mentioned. The Party statement marked in effect a fundamental departure from Lenin's (and Trotsky's) policies concerning "proletarian" literature and culture, and a veiled victory for the Octobrists. It also set the stage for the final battle between the Futurists and the Octobrists over the nature and direction of literature. For all practical purposes, the fellow-travellers played a very marginal role in the battle after their courageous leader, Voronsky, was removed as the editor of Red Virgin Soil in 1927, and shortly thereafter expelled from the Party for his alleged association with the Trotskyite opposition. The significance of the Party statement was not lost on Brik. He realized that the Octobrist group now held the upper hand and joined battle by reminding it of the key points in sections thirteen and sixteen of the Party statement: that problems of literary form and style could not be solved by decrees and slogans and that writers had "to shift the center of gravity of their literary work to literary production in the

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proper sense of the word by using the gigantic material of contemporary life."31 For the Octobrists, however, the Party statement was an invitation to undertake an intensive campaign of vilification, falsification and distortion and thus hasten the Party's acceptance of their literary leadership. One of their tactics was to assail non-Party literary writers and critics as counter-revolutionaries worthy of suppression. Another, related tactic was to invoke the writings of Lenin, quite ironically, to buttress their ideological claims so as to preclude their opponents—the fellow-travellers and the Futurists—from any effective opposition.32 Brik immediately took sharp issue with the Octobrists over their distorted interpretation of Lenin's 1905 article, "Party organization and Party Literature," in which there was an apparent confusion, when read out of context, between Party (i. e. political) literature and imaginative literature. The Octobrists sought to exploit the apparent confusion and asserted that Lenin made no distinction between them. To do this was quite natural and consistent, since the Octobrists, most of whom were Party members with dubious literary talent, rarely made the distinction themselves between political and imaginative literature. But Lenin surely did. He clearly emphasized that "we are discussing Party literature and its subordination to Party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he chooses, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the Party) is also free to exclude members who use the name of the Party to advocate anti-Party views. Freedom of speech and the press must be complete." Brik pointed out the historical context of Lenin's article, which the Octobrists chose to ignore. Brik rightly observed that Lenin spoke in his article of the need of Party members to conform to the political policies of the Party, but this restriction did not apply to non-Party members or to imaginative literature. Indeed, Brik continued, citing the apparent confusion in the article, Lenin did say that "the literary cause must be part of the general cause of the proletariat," but Lenin anticipated objection to his policy and stipulated: "There can be no question that the literary cause is least of all subject to mechanical alignment or levelling, to the domination of the majority over the minority. There can be no question that in this cause it is absolutely necessary to guarantee broad scope to personal initiative, to individual inclination, ideas and fantasy, form and content. All this is undeniable; but all this demonstrates that the literary aspects of the proletarian Party cause cannot be mechanically identified with its other aspects."33

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The literary debate also focused on a Marxist theory of art and literature, which the Octobrists, now renamed the Onlitguardists, were unable to formulate after numerous attempts, simply because Marx never developed a systematic, coherent esthetic theory of any kind, but left largely a diffuse and often contradictory set of assumptions and personal predilections that offered fruitful perspectives and possibilities. This was essentially Brik's view in his provocative theoretical analysis of, and introduction to, Boris Arvatov's "Sociological Poetics." 34 In his book, Arvatov, certainly one of the most underrated and neglected literary critics of the 1920's, made a serious effort to synthesize Marxism and Formalism and to justify the Futurist-Formalist "cultural program" from a Marxist perspective. In order to do this, Arvatov first had to analyze the role and function of "esthetic values" in bourgeois, or prerevolutionary, society; and. he concluded that a "non-ultilitarian" (vneutilitarny) esthetic was its basic characteristic, not with the purpose of creating and organizing life, but of realizing, through "conventional" esthetic material, the dream of an unattainable harmonious and organized society. This dream stemmed from the anarchic structure of bourgeois society, its irrational, accidental and unplanned orientation. Hence the divorce of art from life, and similarly the artist, in his own isolation from, and repudiation of, bourgeois life, gave free reign to his imagination to organize a rational world so as to create the illusion of harmony, order and beauty which he could not find in real life. In Brik's analysis of Arvatov's study, he believed that the proletariat could not find consolation or satisfaction in illusory esthetic organization and harmony because its very purpose was to impose them on life itself and because esthetic Utopias were no substitute for "the urgent tasks of socialist construction." Brik remarked that the proletariat could take advantage of the technical literary devices and skills of bourgeois artists, but only to the extent that it changed them fundamentally to new aims,—to the ideal that it had set for itself. Brik called this "the esthetics of expediency," in opposition to the "non-utilitarian" esthetics of bourgeois society. Brik also pointed out the positve historic role that bourgeois "nonutilitarian" esthetics played in the formal evolution of art: it served as a kind of creative laboratory of artistic and literary forms, which have both reactionary and revolutionary application. This was, to be sure, an unfortunate abuse or misuse of political terminology in

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relation to artistic forms, and it is very likely that he was polemically addressing his opponents. Poetry, for example, can assume a revolutionary role in its use of new forms based on practical language. "The value of non-utilitarian poetry is determined by the measure in which its laboratory experiments can subsequently become part (dostoyanie) of practical activity." This marked for Brik "the historical necessity" of non-utilitarian bourgeois esthetics. In a planned, utilitarian, organized and rational socialist society, however, the bourgeois formal esthetic must be directed to real life, to building and shaping that life consciously; and this involved a corresponding democratization and radical deesthetization of art, language and literature, of which Maykovsky was explicitly the supreme embodiment. As for language categories, Brik differed with Arvatov, who feared that Opoyaz scholars drew too sharp a dichotomy between Poetic (esthetic) and practical (everyday, social) language. Arvatov held that the relationship and inter-action between them were much closer than Opoyaz scholars believed. Brik, however, assured Arvatov that they never claimed to divorce completely those language categories, since the very notion of the poetic category embraced a close, even if parodic, relationship with the practical category. Thus the categories were not mutually exclusive, because changes in practical language produced corresponding changes in poetic language. Brik remarked that when Opoyaz scholars spoke of the independence of poetic language, they meant that its relationships with practical language were indirect and often functioned as parody. But they did maintain that language categories were separable or distinct, however related, and they were "compelled to break the traditional relationships [between language categories], but only in order to establish a new relationship, one more complex but, on the other hand, one more real." What Brik meant was that poetic language was much more than a mere medium of communication because its esthetic functions were manifold: it was able to assume a "self-contained" existence and often served to integrate rhyme, euphony, meter and imagery. Finally, Brik observed that Arvatov had applied the assumptions of Marxism in the light of the scientific "achievements" of the Formalists; and their "achievements" could not be ignored by branding them Formalists, Idealists and Decadents. The accumulated facts and hypotheses of the Formalists had to be applied on a new, scientific basis. There were no basic disagreements and contradictions between the Formalists and Marxist sociologists, because they both pursued

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identical purposes through different analytical methods. Marxism, as a critical tool, could not dispense with scientific facts, but had to understand them by the effectiveness of its own method. Then, in an indirect allusion to the Onlitguardists, Brik concluded: "This, and not endless quoting of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov, is the genuine work of a Marxist."35 After, however, Mayakovsky succeeded in the beginning of 1927 in forming another Futurist journal, New Lef, Brik was able to develop more fully and effectively his theoretical views in three major areas: on two "proletarian" novels by Fedor Gladkov and Aleksandr Fadeev; on the "literature of fact," and on the "social commission." Besides these views, Brik made another important theoretical contribution, "Rhythm and Syntax," which was an extension of his first formalist study, "Sound Repetitions." The publication of Gladkov's Cement in 1925 was hailed by many critics as a significant breakthrough in the development of a "proletarian" and "socialist" novel, and subsequently became a precursor of the "socialist realist" novel. After numerous revisions, it is now rated a "classic" in Soviet-Russian literature. The novel differed fundamentally from the literary themes of the early 1920's which, generally speaking, dealt with the conflict between the "old" and the "new," the meaning of the revolution, and documentary sketches of the revolutionary years. Cement, however, dealt optimistically and romantically with industrial reconstruction, the therapeutic value of labor, and with marital problems in the postrevolutionary period. Artistically, the novel is rather worthless. Cement concerns a civil-war hero, Gleb Chumalov, who returns from the war to his native town to find a cement factory half-destroyed and idle and sets out fanatically to make it operational, despite political opposition, bureaucratic obstacles and other difficulties, which comprise most of the sub-plots of the novel. This is Gleb's heroic feat and political success but, personally, Gleb fails to find happiness because of an irreconcilable conflict with his wife, Dasha, a Party propagandist, who scorns Gleb's male prejudices, simply refuses to resume married life with him, asserts her equality and singlemindedly pursues her independence in "free love." Their unloved and neglected daughter, Nyurka, is abandoned by her mother to be raised in a destitute children's home and dies as a kind of sacrificial victim of the marital conflict. In his highly critical review of Cement, Brik found it puzzling that

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a "bad novel" had such great appeal to so many critics —a frequent phenomenon, he remarked, in literary history. For Brik, the novel contained two central themes that were completely unrelated: Gleb restores the cement factory, and Dasha creates her own independent life. Certain episodes in the work were unrelated to the two themes, especially the death of Nyurka. Brik himself did not offer an explanation for the unrelatedness of the themes, although he was right in his assessment. In Gleb's successful efforts in restoring the factory, Brik noted that Gladkov failed to explain precisely how, in real political and economic terms, Gleb triumphed over so many obstacles and difficulties. Gleb's success could not have been the work of a single man, but the result of collective efforts. As Brik put it, Gleb simply 'jumped over" the obstacles and difficulties "with extraordinary ease," like "a pure-blooded hurdle-jumper who brilliantly takes hurdle by hurdle" to the delight of an enthused audience. In effect, Brik went on, Gladkov had resurrected the theme of folk heroism and imposed it on Gleb; but what emerged was not a Soviet Gleb Chumalov, but a Gleb-Hercules, Gleb-Achilles, Gleb-Roland, Gleb-Ilya Muromets (a Russian folk hero). Moreover, Gladkov also left unexplained Dasha's refusal to renew married life with Gleb after he had proven to her that he was a loyal and zealous communist. Brik suggested that Gladkov's real purpose was to make of Dasha a Joan on Arc, a complete proletarianheroine, and thus avoided the complex problems of building a new life. Without living freely and independently of Gleb's domination, Dasha could not have assumed her heroic role, which she resolutely maintained even in the face of her daughter's death. Gladkov's creation of two heroes, however, had important social and political implications: Dasha's assertion of her feminist independence and her active political work were incompatible with marriage and raising children. Hence the sacrificial death of Nyurka, which was, consciously or unconsciously, Gladkov's cruel but implicit conclusion, or resolution of the marital conflict between Gleb and Dasha. For some women, however, the conclusion would have been absurd. In his conclusion, Brik caustically dismissed Cement as a cheap piece of proletarian mythology and as a distorted projection of the complex reality of the problems of Soviet life. The work contained ingredients similar, Brik remarked, to recipes in cook-books, but the final product was unpalatable because the ingredients themselves were uncooked. Brik added that the novel appealed to those who did not think critically in literary matters; they "saw in it the realization of their imaginary

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literary ideal." Cement was not only bad and a failure, but also dangerous in that in synthesized nothing and only "obfuscated the basic line of our literary development." The construction of Soviet life did not require "proletarian Athenians."36 After Gladkov's work, the next significant "proletarian" novel was Aleksandr Fadeev's The Nineteen (or The Rout), which appeared in 1927, and which has also become a "classic" in Soviet-Russian literature. The Onlitguardists saw Fadeev's work as the realization of their cherished notion of "the living man," and as a highly successful application of Tolstoy's "psychological realism" and an in-depth portrayal of characters. Despite its political motivation and other shortcomings, the novel is not without some artistic merit. The Nineteen it about a partisan (Bolshevik) guerilla detachment fighting against White and Japanese military units during the Civil War in Siberia. The principal character and hero is Osip Levinson, the red-bearded, almost mystical leader of the detachment. Externally, Levinson evinces many essential qualities of a leader: he is wise, dauntless, determined, courageous, patient and tolerant. The detachment has absolute confidence in Levinson's mission. Internally, however, he is weak, diffident and racked by fears and doubts which he conceals from his venerating detachment until it suffers defeat in battle and is reduced to nineteen men, after which Levinson bares his weaknesses to all. The defeat seems to be a prelude to some future victory, for Levinson and his band are better prepared to fight on. The strengths, weaknesses and action of certain members of the detachment are depicted from the perspective of "class" ideology and psychology. Brik came to write an article about The Nineteen after Fadeev had attacked Mayakovsky and the Futurists at a conference of proletarian writers in May 1928. Fadeev remarked that Mayakovsky, in his poem "Good" (1927), failed to understand the complexities and the conflicts of the peasant's psyche and, consequently, portrayed false, pompous and implausible Red soldiers and other figures. As for the Futurists, Fadeev could not see why they railed against psychology and "the living man" in literature. Fadeev called the Futurists "the new, aggressive Soviet bourgeoisie", with the implication that they were counterrevolutionaries.37 In his analysis of The Nineteen, Brik pointed out that Fadeev was not concerned in his work with an objective presentation of the civil war or, more importantly, with the struggle and the external activities of the partisans which would arouse contemporary interest in them, but with

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their inner psychological conflicts and experiences; and precisely for this reason the action of the novel could have taken place in any country, even, for example, medieval Spain. This "psychological" aspect of Fadeev's work clearly reflected the influence of Tolstoy, whom Fadeev admittedly read and studied in accordance with Onlitguardist criteria. Brik, however, went on to note with insight that Chekhov's influence, not Tolstoy's, was far more pervaisve in Fadeev's novel. This influence could be seen in the clash between two dominant types of Chekhovian characters in Fadeev's work: the clash between "weakwilled" and "strong-willed" characters. Brik saw this clash as "the basic theme" of Chekhov's stories and elaborated: "The meaning of this theme is that there are people who are adjusted to life and people who are unadjusted. Adjustment, however, is made at the price of lowering one's intellectual level. To be adjusted to life, one must be more crude, more obtuse, more straightforward. Usually Chekhov does not reveal the internal side of those who are adjusted to life. He presents them as an external force, while he presents the unadjusted, intellectual people with all the inner details of their inner life." The "unadjusted" and "weak-willed" character in Fadeev's novel became the unreliable intellectual, Mechik, "a negative type" who plays "a central role in the whole novel and . . . determines tho whole compositional structure and style of the novel." Opposed to Mechik were Morozka and Baklanov, who were adjusted, crude and obtuse. Brik noted further that Fadeev had made extensive use of Chekhov's stylistic devices, such as the phrases "for some reason," "somewhere," "he felt like," "it seemed to him," etc. For Chekhov, these verbal devices were central to the characterization of the "weak-willed" and "unadjusted" characters so as "to strengthen the impression of [their] vague state." Fadeev, however, by using Chekhov's character types also necessarily used his verbal phrases to characterize the partisans. This led to a bizarre result: the partisans had no notion of the aim or "cause" of their struggle, which Brik saw as the major shortcoming of Fadeev's novel: An extraordinarily absurd story is the result. Our proletarian literature, in desiring somehow to get away from a poster portrayal of an active part of our society, is trying to present that part in a so-called 'living' portrayal. A living portrayal boils down to the point where they are beginning to speak about people not in

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clear and direct language, but in a cloudy and vague one when describing, in the main unconsciously, the movements and experiences of these people. It turns out that 'some' people 'for some reason' proved to be outstanding figures in a cause whose meaning they do not know and do not understand. The formula turns out to be: 'He may be a drunkard and a thief [Morozka and Baklanov], but he is nevertheless a builder of socialism.' It seems to our proletarian writers that the point of showing the living man lies precisely in the contradiction between the results of men's actions and their inner substance. Brik concluded by emphasizing the necessity of a "cause," of showing the role of active men "in our cause."38 In developing his theory of the "literature of fact," Brik explained the role and nature of literature in prerevolutionary society. As he saw it, that literature was created largely by and for the Russian intelligentsia, which nurtured to the point of virtuosity "its ability to experience imaginary facts and events" because it was alienated for a long time from all forms of "practical work."39 In prerevolutionary literature, Brik observed, "every artistic distortion, every tendentious selection of factual materials was regarded as the necessary condition of artistic creativity, as a plus."40 The Bolshevik revolution, however, marked a radical break with that literature, its energizing principle, and with the Russian intelligentsia, whose interests and psychological needs it served. The revolution introduced a completely new constellation of thematic and cultural problems which past literary methods could not contain and reflect; and it created a new, more sophisticated readership, a new "cultural consumer" who could clearly distinguish between "distorted" and "real" facts, and who consequently saw "an artistic work not as a value, but as a means, as a method of conveying real material."41 Brik remarked that "imaginative" literature, because of its intrinsic distortion of "real" reality, could not obtain any serious hold on the new "active," integrated, purposeful Soviet intelligentsia, since it posed "artistic" problems of which it was aware in their "real" form. The new Soviet intelligentsia thus preferred to read "entertaining, translated nonsense" which did not compel him to probe the complex problems of changing reality.42 For Brik, therefore, Soviet writers were not free agents in applying any set of literary techniques and forms because every age advances its own specific literary and cultural tasks which require for their ex-

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pression new, historically determined and limited techniques and forms. "All attempts to find in the old literature models for today's literary art are hopeless. All attempts to apply political pressure on writers to write from the perspective of worker-peasant life are absurd."43 It was a mistake to speak of the natural resumption of previous artistic treatment of factual materials simply because, presumably, they did not make up a synthetic whole and required "creative refraction through the prism of one's soul," or "the direct expression of the writer's intimate thoughts and feelings."44 Brik, however, did discern a key functional identity between preand postrevolutionary writers. Although the formal literary categories had changed in relation to the treatment of factual materials, "the role of the cultural worker has not changed. The writer's obligation is to defy stangnant traditions and still put an idea into effect which he considers necessary for the success of our cultural organization (stroitelstvo)."45 This had to be done by a fixation and montage of the facts of reality as expressed in diaries, memoirs, recollections, biographies, travelogues, sketches, reports about factories and collective farms, and in newspaper and journalistic work.46 This was Brik's antidote to the literary crisis of the 1920's and the crisis of the novel. As Thomson rightly points out, Brik and other Futurists, who similarly advocated the "literature of fact," "did not underestimate the difficulties of creating this new aesthetic. They saw that it was not enough to organize writers into 'brigades' and dispatch them to observe and describe new kolkhozes and factories for them to acquire a proletarian outlook. The reportages of Leonov, Pil'nyak and even Gladkov abounded in fine writing in the worst 'fictional' style. Such artistic devices as generalisation, typification, and grandiose historical comparisons, served only to distort the reader's attention from what was unique and real here today. The indulgence in 'beautiful' imagery and loyalist sentiments was all very well, but the facts were still better. Hence the newspaper report, the observations of untutored sel'kory [rural correspondents] and rabkory [worker correspondents], uncluttered by any kind of 'creative writing' were of infinitely more value than anything that the established novelists could provide."47 But the antidote also contained, in this period of increasing political and literary regimentation and bureaucratization, its own problematics: the inevitability of disputes over the authenticity, necessity, desirability and relevance of the hard facts of Soviet reality. The trend in literature now pointed clearly to that "distortion" and "tendentious" portrayal of

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Soviet life, to the class struggle and political propaganda; and the "literature of fact," by freeing the writer of any commitment to political ideology, clashed with those purposes. This can be seen in Brik's comment about a "definite tendency" among literary journals and film studios to reject works that dealt factually with the "political moment" and other contemporary themes. Even works that smacked of such were considered of no artistic value. Brik angrily related the fears of writers that works of a factual, documentary nature would not be accepted. He attributed this hostile climate to the bureaucracy as a whole, and expressed his determination to struggle against its "backward" character.48 Brik's theory was no doubt extreme for its time; but that does not invalidate its seminal significance and cogent relevance to the literary situation as a viable alternative to the increasing literary regimentation and orthodoxy. In fact, there is a body of neglected evidence that Brik's theory found solid support and resonance not only among the Onlitguardist faction itself, but among other writers.49 In early 1929, two anonymous articles came out forcefully in favor of Brik's theory and against the literary slogans of the Onlitguardists. The articles argued that the "documentary genre" was the most effective way of depicting "concrete living material" and of struggling against the hypnotic and preponderant literary traditions of the 19th century. Too many writers, they claimed, by consciously imitating the psychological types of Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bobrynsky, failed to see '"the living man' of social reality from the perspective of their own time." The so-called "thick" journals, patterned on those of the 19th century, were declining steadily because they were publishing boring, unoriginal, "ready-made" works on incidental themes, from which it was difficult to determine just what the literary interests and tastes of Soviet society and its political leaders were.50 Echoing Brik, one writer pointed out that, since the literary views of the editors of those journals shaped literature, "documentary literature" had been ignored, but was at last being published in Red Virgin Soil, October and Young Guard.51 He added: "The 'documentary genre' is spontaneously growing in our literature, and it cannot in any way be regarded as the invention of Lef (the sketches of L. Reisner, M. Shaginyan, Furmanov and others). Literature thirsts for new material and reality; it is being stifled by a hollow, bookish tradition. The 'documentary genre' must provide that material for our literature and direct the writer to the 'pasture' of our passionate and stormy epoch."52

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Brik's most widely recognized and discussed theory, however, was the "social commission," a client-producer relationship from an "artistic" vantage, by which an "artist" consciously and independently fulfills the cultural, social and class needs or demands of his time. The mission of the commission also entailed the opportunity for formal experimentation: to create the forms adequate to the fulfillment of the commission.53 The theory had key implications: "artistic" production was similar to other forms of production or work, since it was fundamentally a function of craft or skills, not essentially the expression of political ideology. Nor did it mean the imposition of any "tendency" in fulfilling the commission. Put differently, the "artist" was not a creative, spiritual entity above society, but a worker integrally related to the normal processes of production. As noted, Brik first expounded the theory during the revolutionary years, and it was extensively practiced by Inkhuk during the early 1920's. By 1927, the "social commission" gained significant currency to the point where Vyacheslav Polonsky, a violent opponent of the Futurists, stirred a heated debate by attacking it as a vulgar expression of Marxism.54 According to Polonsky, the "social commission" was the idealist theory of an intelligentsia "declassed" by the revolution which, because it was unable to express the world view of the proletariat in artistic forms, sought to form a bridge to the proletariat in order to become its spokesman. The theory falsely identified the relationship — "buyer—seller"—that actually existed between social classes and their artistic spokesmen; it was unacceptable to young writers of proletarian and peasant origin, who were not craftsmen in pursuit of commissions, but the "miniature cells of the collective brain." Their task was to embody "artistic thought and reflection in images of the collective consciousness. They recognized themselves as the mouthpiece through which the collective that created them speaks."55 This was an apparent echo of the great Russian literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848). The debate between Polonsky and Brik on the "social commission" is perhaps a classic example of how reference to the loose, ambiguous and contradictory Marxist artistic assumptions can result in two polar, but equally valid, positions: the expression of class interests and ideology in art, its nature, role and determinants. As Arvon has observed, Marx and Engels "at times . . . view art as totally dependent on the social situation, at times as completely autonomous, and at times as an instrument of political action."56 Marx wanted work to reach the

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height of art in a communist society, but distinguished art from all forms of work. For Marx, art was almost invariably class oriented, an integral function of the socio-economic structure, of productive relations, and yet able to transcend its class character and become universal. For Polonsky, art was, true to Marxist assumptions, an autonomous form of objective knowledge of reality in "artistic images," a source of esthetic pleasure and experience, a vitally necessary expression of human, universal needs and problems, be they moral, intellectual or spiritual. Polonsky saw this as the permanent feature of art in any historical period. This was at once both Marxist and un-Marxist. In line with Lenin and Trotsky, among others, Polonsky believed that Soviet literature had to draw upon the rich literary heritage of 19th century Russian literature, because the problems it posed were peculiar to every age. But Polonsky (and others) never clearly explained the limitations of that heritage on Soviet literature. This belief was unMarxist to the extent that it did not take into account the necessity of new relationships between content and form owing to a new political and social revolution, namely, the Bolshevik revolution and its professed aims. With regard to Brik, there is essentially nothing in his views of art that contradicts Marxist assumptions. In accord with those assumptions, Brik believed that, in a particular stage of social and cultural development, in which bourgeois culture and class conflict still predominate, art serves a class function or class needs. As he implied earlier, art would ultimately be expressed in all forms of human work with the triumph of the proletariat, where art would be indistinguishable from work. This marks the truly Utopian feature of Marxist assumptions. For Brik, art, as reflected in factual representation and "social commission," stimulates consciousness to change reality, to provide factual knowledge of that reality, and serves cultural, social, economic and political needs. As for the Russian literary heritage, Brik considered it inappropriate, in formal terms at any rate, to the new social and cultural demands of the revolution. Polonsky's view of literature, like that of George Lukacs, was static, in terms of the 19th century Russian classics. Brik, however, viewed literature dialectically, from the perspective of stages, of what was historically necessary to a particular stage of social development: the "literature of fact" and the "social commission." Brik thus neglected the immediate relevance of the Russian literary heritage to the human needs and problems of

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Soviet society of the moment, and consequently sacrificed them for class needs. This marks the rigid and vulnerable feature of Brik's views because they flow from the intrinsic contradiction or tension within Marxist assumptions between historical, class determinism, necessity and existential, human needs and ends. The similarities, largely the differences, between Polonsky's and Brik's views, in the context of Marxist assumptions and the literary situation of the 1920's, arise further in their debate. From Brik's point of view, Polonsky's attack on the "social commission" ran counter to Marxist, assumptions; and it could boil down to "the totally preposterous assumption that if the czar reigned once more in Russia, Mayakovsky would begin to write poetry, with the same ease and fervor, in glory of the autocracy." Polonsky, Brik observed, could not conceive of an "I—You" opposition in the proletarian class, but only a "We," but in real practical terms, such an opposition existed by a common order for a product. For Brik, the "social commission" challenged the view that artistic creation was a universal expression or phenomenon, above and beyond the class interests and aims of a particular social-historical setting. While Polonsky correctly admitted that artists belonged to a specific social class, he incorrectly concluded, as Brik saw it, that the great "inspired" works of art were classless and universal. Brik found this contradictory, because it was precisely those works that were class expressions. If, therefore, an artist desired to be universal, he obviously could not express the class interests and ideology of his time. Polonsky, in support of his contention, singled out Tolstoy as one who did not receive any commission from his class, but was able to express the feelings and ideas of the peasantry. Brik replied that so did Engels of the working class, with the difference that Tolstoy only expressed, in Lenin's words, those ideas that reflected the interests of the "small landowners in general," and eschewed the ideas of the part of the heterogeneous peasantry concerning agrarian revolts and insurrections. If, Brik continued, Polonsky's view of the universal character of artistic creation were to hold true, then artists and writers did not create, or want to create, for a ruling class. Brik added that "the theory of the social commission is directed against this false and dangerous view. It asserts that the writer is not the object of the social struggle, but its subject, and that there cannot be a situation where a writer creates something that does not bear his social mark." Polonsky's objection to the "social commission" also dealt with the

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problem of artistic innovation, which clashed with prevailing social tastes, which was rejected by a client, but which subsequently gained recognition. For Brik, this objection was hardly novel to the "Lefists," i. e. the Futurists, who constantly and vigorously battled against established tastes. Brik then offered this disturbing definition of innovation: "Any innovation is of social significance only when it responds to the demands of a new class that has not yet established its cultural supremacy." Brik meant that, because bourgeois culture still prevailed in Soviet society, a struggle still had to be waged against that culture and its artistic forms; and in order to do that, both the Futurist innovators and other innovative "esthetes" had to ally themselves with the ideas and attitudes of a "definite class" before its political instrument, the state, determined what it was willing to accept in artistic terms. As for Polonsky's claim that the Futurists were a "declassed intelligentsia," Brik noted that that alone did not indicate the direction of their "declassing." Indeed, Brik said, the Futurists were "declassed" into the proletariat; and their alliance with it could only be welcomed, even by Polonsky. But, Brik continued, what perplexed Polonsky was not the bridge that the Futurists wished to form to the proletariat, but the contradiction between the "social commission" and their insistence on autonomy. Polonsky could not understand how the Futurists could simultaneously work by commissions and still preserve their autonomy. Brik explained that when the Futurists spoke of a commission, they did not mean that of individual representatives of a class or of separate organizations, but of the question of the autonomous understanding of the commission which could conflict with the actual commission of individual representatives. Brik elaborated: "It is precisely because the Lefists are not indifferent to those for whom they work, to whether the actual commission corresponds to the commission as the Lefists understand it. That is why they insist on their autonomy, which irritated Polonsky for so long. This is not the autonomy of a social group, but of a production collective that has the daring to state to a client that he himself does not understand what he is commissioning." Brik then offered this highly suggestive illustration of how this conflict between client-producer could occur: "If the Moscow Arts Committee plans to commission the decoration of Moscow with busts and monuments, and the Lefists, when rejecting that commission, propose instead to pave the streets, then the Lefists oppose the Committee not as two social groups, but as two groups of one and the very same social nature that

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understand the demands of their class in different ways."57 Thus the artist-producer, not the state or its administrative organs, retains the ultimate veto over any commission that he finds contrary to class necessity.

In July 1928, Mayakovsky seemed to realize the futility of the Futurist struggle against the Onlitguardists, whose organization, The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Rapp), gradually gained the upper hand over other literary groups as the Party's chosen literary agent. The futility of the struggle against Rapp and the inevitable liquidation of the Futurist group revived Mayakovsky's dormant fears of his own recognition, role and place in Russian literature. He decided, therefore, to abandon the Futurist group and the editorship of New Lef to form a new movement, "To the Left of Lef" with himself as its one and only representative. The movement was ostensibly directed against all literary groupings, but Mayakovsky's real purpose was to rally writers of all literary persuasion around himself as an effective opposition to Rapp. Mayakovsky's numerous statements about the new movement were incoherent and confused. As much as he tried, he could not break out of the Futurist literary categories that had so firmly shaped his mental cast. He could affirm the value of the "social commission," attack the political apathy that had gripped the Futurists, consider their formal experiments and studies dangerous, but yet urge them to "innovative work" in "living production." He considered himself a "proletarian poet," "an instrument of the class struggle," but the proletarian poets of Rapp were "fellow-travellers" in relation to himself.58 Contrary to Mayakovsky's expectations, instead of writers rallying around him, they, including his Futurist colleagues, began to attack him with increasing frequency. 59 In May 1929, however, Mayakovsky finally realized the futility of a movement that only locked him in isolation. He rejoined the Futurists to form "The Revolutionary Front of Arts" (Ref), and together with Brik applied for a journal under that rubric. The aim of the journal was "the immediate mobilization of all literary-artistic forces of the socialist sector for a vigorous struggle with the intensification of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies." 60 The journal was to appear in late 1929, but in a letter to Gosizdat on October 2, Mayakovsky remarked that its publication had to be postponed "because of the need to resolve complex theoretical problems." 61 The journal was never published.

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The reason for this postponement became clear three weeks later, during a meeting of the Ref group, when Mayakovsky asked his colleagues to help him organize, in the name of Ref, an exhibit of only his works, which subsequently came to be called "20 Years of Work." Bewildered by the egoistic irrelevance of Mayakovsky's request, the Futurists balked at helping him to organize the exhibit. The prospect of organizing it himself, which involved extensive travel and time to collect and prepare materials, angered Mayakovsky and created new tensions between him and the Futurists, including Brik. The exhibit was orginally planned for December 1, 1929, but was actually held on February 1, 1930. In his notes concerning Mayakovsky's exhibit, written in 1940, Brik also expressed some bewilderment at Mayakovsky's desire to hold an exhibit; but, of course, after living some fifteen years with Mayakovsky, Brik could not but understand the deep personal and psychological roots of Mayakovsky's behavior at the time. Brik wrote that "Volodya wanted recognition; he wanted Party and government representatives to come to the exhibit to say that Mayakovsky was a fine poet. Volodya was tired of struggling, fighting, polemics. He wanted some peace, a bit of creative comfort. Volodya felt that all kinds of literary 'selfseekers and skinflints' were living better that he, more at peace and more prosperous. He did not envy them, but felt that he had more of a right than they to some of the comforts of life and, mainly, to recognition. Thus Mayakovsky undertook the exhibit with the aim of receiving that recognition. At the time, we never pondered that; we could not understand at all why Volodya became so irritable and angry at us, not openly, but somehow through hints. He would reproach us with half-words that we were doing nothing for his exhibit. He became querulous, capricious, crude, and finally quarreled with all the Refists. He told me: 'If Ref had been the only tie between us, I would have quarreled with you, too, but something else ties us together.' I realized that Volodya was in a disgusting mood, that his nerves had shattered, but I did not suspect the real cause of his frame of mind. It was quite unlike and uncharacteristic of Volodya to have this desire to be officially recognized because I was so used to seeing him in a fighting mood, in battle, in polemics."62 While this is certainly part of the truth, Brik does not explain his own apparent refusal to help Mayakovsky in organizing his exhibit and the real source of the growing tension with him. That source will emerge from the following course of events. On December 4, 1929, the Party, in an editorial in Pravda, finally

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gave its long-awaited approval for Rapp to consolidate all literary "forces" under its leadership. All writers and critics were supposed to join Rapp voluntarily and apply for admission to it individually. Mayakovsky pondered his decision for a month. On January 3,1930 he sent Rapp a statement of his intent to join it. For Mayakovsky, this decision must have been an extremely bitter, totally humiliating personal defeat to surrender so quickly to his arch enemies. To defy the Party's wishes was perhaps unthinkable after he had put his art completely in its service. His statement to Rapp contained two critical sentences directly related to the Futurists: "Artistic-methodological disagreements can be resolved for the benefit of proletarian literature within the limits of the Association. I believe that all active members of Ref should make the same conclusion, which has been dictated by all our previous work." 63 Mayakovsky's surrender, however, was unwelcome to Rapp, which was hardly in a position to reject such a towering poetic figure. Yet Rapp did not know how to deal with him and how to fit him into their organizational framework. Brown writes that the "bureaucrats in control of RAPP were afraid of the poet and did not very much want him in their organization."64 Throughout January 1930, while Rapp wrestled with the problem of Mayakovsky, persistent rumors spread that Mayakovsky would not be allowed to write lyric poetry in Rapp and that—if a greater absurdity is imaginable—special lectures were to be given to Mayakovsky on Rapp's poetic principles. After his poetic "re-education," Rapp planned, ironically, to have Mayakovsky teach poetry to factory workers. The lead editorial of the February 1930 issue of Rezets (The Chisel), a Rapp publication, gave some indication of the conditions under which Mayakovsky could join Rapp, including the anticipated applications for admission by the Futurists. It remarked that Mayakovsky's sincerity in joining was unquestionable, but it was difficult for him "to rid himself immediately of the heavy burden of Lefist errors." This suggested a public recantation by Mayakovsky. As for the Futirists, a "sharp eye" was needed to detect and unmask their ideas, especially those of Futurist critics, most likely Brik, because "it was around such critics that the least stable of the elements of Rapp can most probably gather." 65 In the same issue, a discussion was held with the poet, Nikolai Tikhonov, concerning Mayakovsky and lyric poetry. Tikhonov called Mayakovsky "the greatest poet of our time," whose art had "enriched both poetic language and living speech." That Mayakovsky wrote many hasty and

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"hack-work" pieces in no way detracted from his poetic significance. In response to the question, "Why is lyric poetry gradually dying out?," Tikhonov remarked that the poet wanted to be a witness of, and a participant in, the events of his time, and that the poet's "personal love experiences and expressive feelings are too insignificant in view of the new currents of the time; the lyric themes of yesterday's poetry cannot help the poet to become conscious of the new sensibilities that come with the changing picture of the world. The lyric poet is vanishing and drying up."66 While Mayakovsky was firmly fixed to a point of no return, the overwhelming majority of the Futurists had yet to reach a decision on joining Rapp. On December 2, 1929, almost in anticipation of the forthcoming Party call for the consolidation of all writers under Rapp, three leading Futurists, Sergei Tretyakov, Nikolai Chuzhak, Viktor Pertsov, abandoned the /?e/group. They formed a "shock brigade" and took up "practical work" in factories and collective farms in order to write about the first five-year economic plan. Brik had suggested this to artists in 1918, and by now it was common practice, as hundreds of writers were ordered to go to factories and collective farms to describe the economic reconstruction of the country. In the middle of January 1930, the Futurists devoted three days to a discussion of their strategic moves; and it is Brik's views at the discussion that create a picture of what Brik advised Mayakovsky about joining Rapp and the tension that developed between them. At the meeting, Brik summed up the Futurist struggle of the preceding years. He reaffirmed the relevance of the "social commission." He noted the constant battle of the Futurists who rejected the commissions of clients. Brik observed that "If you are given a commission which you find false and unnecessary, then you have no right to fulfill it. If, however, the commission coincides with your political-cultural aims, then you have that right." Brik pointed out the great contribution of the Russian Formalists in establishing "the laws of art and literature" which could not be ignored. As he went on, Brik introduced a new note into his discussion: the aim and nature of "imaginative literature." Its aim was not "to infect" and arouse "an unnecessary waste of emotions," but "to activize man, to revolutionize him, to incite him to a specific direction, to the one which we need. When they tell us that we are only for facts, for information, we say that is untrue. We are not only for facts, but also for distortion, for falsehood, for caricature, for the grotesque. We are against verisimilitude, against all art and literature which gives

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neither fact, nor falsehood, nor truth, nor invention, and with which one does not know what to do." Then Brik approached the crucial question of joining Rapp. As he began, it was not clear whether he was actually suggesting that the Futurists join it or whether he was merely exploring the possibilities that membership offered the Futurists and other alternatives. Brik was obviously torn between his loyalty to Mayakovsky, who had already committed himself to Rapp, and to the Futurists and himself. Should Mayakovsky remain alone in Rapp, or should the Futurists join him? At first, Brik remarked that the Futurists should join Rapp with a view to pursuing their own "line" in it, as Mayakovsky had advised them two weeks earlier in his statement to Rapp. Brik then added that the Futurists still had a working organization, but what was its purpose? Brik explained: "To develop our own point of view, our own understanding of the cultural paths along which not only we, but the whole cultural revolution must follow. That is why we are meeting." Now Brik explored another possibility: to join Rapp and play a passive role in it, without organizing any Futurist circles, but still maintain close ties so as to help each other in cultural problems. Then an alternative arose: to work independently for journals, such as Komsomolskaya pravda and Molodaya gvardiya. But Brik reflected that this work would mean the disintegration of Ref as "a free association open to all without any regulations, any bureaucratic formalities." Brik finally reached the point: "We are not joining Rapp because it is not, unfortunately, a mass organization, but has taken the form of an organization of ruling bureaucrats."67 Brik thus remained consistent with his theory of the "social commission'" which also extended to a political command, which Mayakovsky could accept because, to use Brik's words, if it coincided with his personal political-cultural aims. The internal evidence of Brik's views at this meeting can only allow the assertion that Brik explored with Mayakovsky the alternatives and options of his joining and not joining Rapp; and he left Mayakovsky with the final decision, with which Brik personally disagreed and which resulted in the tension between them. What cannot be asserted is that Brik encouraged or advised Mayakovsky to join Rapp. If anything, Brik advised him not to.68 There is additional evidence to support these assertions. In late December 1929, after Mayakovsky had already reached his decision to join Rapp, the Briks curiously decided to take a two-month trip abroad, he, ostensibly, to renew his ties with communist and left-wing

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publishers, and she to visit her mother in London. The Briks were supposed to leave Moscow at the end of January 1930, but because of Lily's involvement in Mayakovsky's exhibit and its opening on February 1, the trip was postponed until February 15. The Briks returned to Moscow after they had learned of Mayakovsky's suicide on April 14, 1930, almost two months later. Why would Brik himself want to leave the literary world and Mayakovsky at such a critical period? Certainly Brik's disagreement with Mayakovsky's decision was probably the most critical factor because of its fateful consequences for Brik. Brik wanted to escape from any attack that he had refused to join Rapp with Mayakovsky. If Brik had remained in Moscow, he probably would have been under heavy pressure and attack to join Rapp, with the likely prospect of being assigned a trivial and degrading position in a remote region so as to be isolated effectively from Mayakovsky and the Futurists. The pressure to recant his Futurist and Formalist errors, including a "reeducation," would have added to Brik's humiliation. If the attack on him had actually occurred while he was abroad, Brik surely had the choice of remaining abroad, perhaps permanently, but Mayakovsky's suicide compelled his return to fulfill an imperative mission. Lily's departure with Brik was also a temporary escape from the tensions with Mayakovsky, but they were of a different order and of a much earlier origin, dating back to the early 1920's, when she had outgrown her "poetic" role of the "unattainable" woman. Their marriage was often estranged, with several lengthy separations, all of her choosing, because "she could not endure the excessive demands of her great lover (we must recall and emphasize that there is no evidence that she loved him), whose alternating fits of jealousy and depression made him a difficult companion."69 Moreover, Lily herself was always in great demand. She wanted to be "attainable;" and she found that occasional relationships with others were a way of luring back, hopefully, a much more tolerable and manageable Mayakovsky, and also a psychologically welcome and necessary relief from Mayakovsky's obsessions, which she described in her memoirs as his tormenting fear of old age and the lack of poetic recognition, and his frequent play with, and threat of, suicide since 1914.70 Mayakovsky's psychological need was such that he had to be told constantly that he was the greatest poet in the universe; and the more he was told this, the less he was convinced of it. Like Lily, Mayakovsky also sought new relationships, usually of the

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"unattainable" kind, expecially in the latter half of the 1920's, with Tatyana Yakovleva in Paris and Veronika Polonskaya in Moscow. Mayakovsky apparently could not transcend "unattainable" women, perhaps because of the fruitful poetic possibilities that they afforded. "Attainable" women would not permit him to vent his anguish and fury at the world. Paradoxically, however, the search of both Lily and Mayakovsky for new relationships often served to regenerate their own relationship, although temporarily. Mayakovsky's love for Lily never seriously waned, but Lily's love for him inevitably became tinged with strong feelings of frustration and futility. She realized that a permanent relationship with Mayakovsky was inconceivable. The only solid love in her life was Brik, but he, too, was bound to be affected by the frequent estrangement and tension between Lily and Mayakovsky. In 1928, Brik formed, probably to Lily's great chagrin, if not jealousy, a rather permanent relationship with Evgeniya Zhemchuzhnaya, a charming, quiet and attractive librarian whom Brik had met at a visit to a children's library, and who became his secretary-librarian. They were subsequently married, or, at any rate, considered themselves married; and Brik, escaping the tensions between Lily and Mayakovsky, often lived with Evgeniya, whose apartment was, for the speedy Brik, only several moments away. It may very well be, then, that Lily's desire to accompany Brik abroad was to regenerate her first marriage with Brik, her first husband. On February 1, 1930 Mayakovsky's exhibit opened and continued until February 15. Three-hundred and sixty-four items of his artistic "laboratory and arsenal" were displayed; and however overwhelming the exhibit, it could not reflect the truly extraordinary range and depth of Mayakovsky's creative activity for twenty years, especially after 1917. The press as a whole failed to announce the opening of the exhibit. The February issue of Press and Revolution contained a large photograph of Mayakovsky and a congratulatory note on Mayakovsky's exhibit, but by order of the head of Gosizdat, they were torn out of the issues before circulation (to Mayakovsky's knowledge). The invitations to the exhibit stated that there would be literary and poetic readings by both Ref members and Mayakovsky, but only the Briks (and Shklovsky) were the two major representatives who did attend. The large majority of the five-hundred or so visitors were students, professors and workers, whose presence contradicted several signs that were placed at the entrance of the exhibit by Rapp agents: "Mayakovsky is unintelligible to the masses." The literary world largely boycotted

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the exhibit so as to avoid the "sharp eye" of the Rapp leaders who were present at the opening. No prominent Party figures attended, as Mayakovsky had hoped. At the exhibit, Mayakovsky read his last poem, "At the Top of My Voice," written specifically for the exhibit. He began by noting that he did not want to be excavated in the future from the "ossified shit of the day" as a bard who stressed, in his poetry, the hygienic need of the masses to drink "boiled water" and "the furious enemy of raw water." Mayakovsky wanted to project his own poetic image and legacy to posterity. Mayakovsky said that he could have written "romances," or lyric poetry, which would have been "more profitable and charming," but instead, "I subdued myself repeatedly, standing on the throat of my own song." Mayakovsky expressed confidence, however, in the immortality of his poetry, because it would "reach out through the peaks of the ages, over the heads of poets and governments." Mayakovsky saw his poems as "armies... armed to the teeth," now "standing at attention, lead-laden, ready for death and immortal fame." He pointed out the Marxist armor of his poetry in the struggle against the enemy of the proletariat and his own. This struggle did not bring him any accumulation of rubles, and no "mahogany chairs" were delivered to his home. All that he really needed was a "freshly laundered shirt." His political credentials for the time were "the hundreds of volumes of his Party books," his Party card, which he would raise high above "the band of poetic self-seekers and skin-flints."71 In his poem, Mayakovsky affirmed the ambiguous legacy of his creative genius. Mayakovsky's last weeks were spent in extreme isolation and despondency, but there was a ray of hope with a twenty-two year old married actress, Veronika Polonskaya, whom Mayakovsky saw as his final redemption. Mayakovsky met Veronika in May 1929, shortly after he returned from Paris, where he failed to persuade Tatyana Yakovleva, with whom he was passionately in love, to return to Russia with him (discussed below). At the time, Veronika was connected with the Moscow Art Theatre, but was playing the role of an American movie star in the film, "The Glass Eye," produced by Lily Brik and Vitaly Zhemchuzhny (no apparent relation to Evgeniya Zhemchuzhnaya). Mayakovsky's own work on his play, "The Bathhouse," drew him to Polonskaya, who actively helped Mayakovsky with his play. Their relationship ultimately led to love, especially on Mayakovsky's part. That Veronika shared the intensity of his love is, at best, questionable.

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In her memoirs, written in 1938, Veronika described her relationship with Mayakovsky in his last days. He comes off as a tormented man, halfmad, extremely possessive, and threatening to take his life almost daily. Veronika claims that Mayakovsky carried a revolver with him because of a recent attempt on his life (Lily Brik refutes this in her own memoirs). Mayakovsky demanded that Veronika abandon her work and her husband so that they could be married, but she was very reluctant to do the former because of her love for her work and the first leading role that she had received in the Moscow Art Theatre at the time. Veronika leads us to believe that her refusal of Mayakovsky's demands was a major factor in his suicide, an act of revenge against her, a kind of perverse way of punishing Veronika for her refusal to marry him. During their final moments together on the morning of April 14, they came to a violent feud in the corridor of his quarters. As Veronika rejected his demands and insisted on making rehearsal at the theatre, Mayakovsky tore himself away and rushed into his room to do away with himself. Veronika mentions the shot that she heard and her momentary witness of the unbearably lurid scene, from which she fled.72 Mayakovsky left the following note, dated two days earlier: To All! Don't blame anyone for my death, and please don't gossip. The deceased despised gossip. Mother, sisters and friends, forgive me—this was not the way to do it (I don't advise it to others), but there was no other way for me. Lily, love me. Comrade Government, my family is: Lily Brik, mother, my sisters and Veronika Vitoldovna Polonskaya. If you can give them a decent life, thanks. Give my unfinished poems to the Briks, they will understand them.

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As they say, 'the incident is closed,' the love boat smashed against the hum-drum of daily life. I owe life nothing, and there's no need to go over the mutual pains, troubles and griefs. Good luck to all of you! Vladimir Mayakovsky 4/12/30 Comrades in Rapp, don't think I was a coward. Seriously, nothing could be done. Regards. Tell Ermilov that it's a pity that he had the slogan removed. We should have settled our argument. V.M. There are 2000 rubles in my desk—pay my taxes. If that's not enough, get the rest from Gosizdat.73 V. M.

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One cannot exaggerate the psychological impact of Mayakovsky's suicide on Brik's life. A single bullet had also shattered a creative and personally enriching relationship; it produced for Brik a temporary crisis of identity and deep feelings of guilt for Mayakovsky's suicide. Brik could not but feel that Mayakovsky's "failure" was his own. The desire that constantly haunted Brik until his death was "to have a talk with Volodya." The prospect of creative inactivity and loneliness was also bitter, because Brik would no longer read poetry to Mayakovsky, or Mayakovsky to Brik. Mayakovsky would no longer pace outside Brik's room each morning, impatiently waiting for Brik to have breakfast with him. For it was then that Brik and Mayakovsky would spend the entire morning discussing the literary and political events of the day in journals and daily newspapers.1 Brik, however, soon found the all-embracing road to redemption. Since Mayakovsky symbolized for him the creative expression of his literary and artistic notions, there was now really nothing left to do but to wage the very last battle—to ensure that Mayakovsky's poetic legacy found its rightful place in Soviet literature, despite all the sacrifices and consequences involved. Brik was completely convinced that, if Mayakovsky wanted anything during his last years, it was precisely that poetic recognition; and it is to that imperative mission that Brik dedicated the rest of his life. The success of that mission would also give new meaning and validity to all of Brik's failed efforts since 1917. Brik, therefore, made Mayakovsky's poetic legacy his very own. But Brik's intent to stress exclusively the political commitment and service of Mayakovsky's poetry to the Bolshevik revolution and regime met with Lily's reluctance. Lily, to be sure, had a vital personal stake in Mayakovsky's poetic legacy, since his lyric poetry was largely dedicated to her; and Brik's political projection of that legacy would only sacrifice and consequently efface her own role in Mayakovsky's poetry. Brik,

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however, was convinced that only a political projection of Mayakovsky's poetic legacy could be acceptable to the Soviet regime and capable of bringing Mayakovsky the recognition that they both believed he deserved; and the very attainment of that recognition would inevitably ensure Lily a place in Mayakovsky's legacy. However unconvinced, Lily agreed, for the political context offered no alternative. Judging by what he had already written about Mayakovsky's poetry, one could say that Brik did not particularly want to emphasize Lily's role in Mayakovsky's poetic legacy, either because it was already well-known, or because of the personal sensitivity of the subject—Lily was his first wife—or simply because Brik wanted to avoid any discussion of his and Lily's personal relationships with Mayakovsky. That Mayakovsky's suicide note cast Lily's love for him in doubt—"Lily, love me." —was perhaps an added factor. Earlier, in 1927, Mayakovsky had asked Brik to write the critical commentary for his pre-revolutionary poetry, which appeared in the first volume of his collected works in 1928. Brik's article of twenty-five short pages was published anonymously, and is probably the most illuminating of Brik's literary criticism, one that has been widely read but rarely, if ever, cited, perhaps because of its anonymity. In the article, Brik analyzed not only the social isolation and formalist orientation of Symbolist poetry but described the revolutionary formal significance2 and evolution of Mayakovsky's declamatory poetry from its origins to the Bolshevik revolution. He pointed out the major themes in Mayakovsky's larger poems, their development and continuity, and the poems that served as prepatory sketches for the larger poems. For Brik, Mayakovsky, in the role of a martyr, took up the cause of the oppressed and downtrodden of the dehumanizing city and stressed the necessity of revolt against the social order. The revolt extended to God (religion) and art, including Mayakovsky's opposition to World War I. Brik also pointed out the deep tone of despair, alienation and loneliness in Mayakovsky's poetry. Although the theme of tragic and unrequited love tended to be dominant in Mayakovsky's poetry, Brik considered that theme as an added source of Mayakovsky's suffering and impotence which "kindled his rebellious impulse." After the completion of the poem "Man" in 1917, however, Mayakovsky saw himself as a useless, hopeless and homeless being on earth, although conscious of his enormous creative powers. Mayakovsky had thematically exhausted his pre—revolutionary poetry and 'lacked an adequate theme." Brik concluded that "Revolution became for him that theme." 3

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After Mayakovsky's suicide, however, the literary climate became increasingly regimented. The Stalinist regime tightened its grip on literature and imposed heavy political demands on writers to assist in socialist construction. Brik consequently placed greater emphasis on Mayakovsky's personal and poetic political commitment to the Bolshevik cause and regime, especially after 1917. This political emphasis can be seen in Brik's very first article about two months after Mayakovsky's suicide. Brik saw Mayakovsky not as a poet of lofty and sweet themes "to caress the ear," but one who defied the poetic demands of the bourgeoisie. The whole of Mayakovsky's pre-revolutionary poetry was an angry revolt against bourgeois society; and the theme of revolt required a new declamatory poetic form and new words that were alien to bourgeois poetry. In this article, Brik felt compelled to comment on Mayakovsky's suicide. He quickly dismissed rumors about Mayakovsky's "secret [throat] ailment, failure in love and other nonsense. Mayakovsky very ill-advisedly and extravagantly dissipated his physical and spiritual powers. He overrated them and exhausted himself. He did not come to grips with a petty personal problem. He overrated himself." This explanation was hardly to the point, but does reveal Brik's sensitivity to the subject. In concluding his article, Brik ovserved that Mayakovsky's literary legacy was "enormous." His work had to be studied and analyzed in all its manifestations because it would "help our young poets to find the way to make poetry a powerful instrument in the struggle for socialism, to overcome the last traces of bourgeois poetic traditions which have no place in proletarian literature."4 A year later, Brik's political emphasis increased. The revolution was no longer the theme of Mayakovsky's poetry, as Brik had noted in 1928, but the "cause" of his whole life. Brik singled out Mayakovsky's artistic activity for the Russian Telegraph Agency (Rosta) during the revolutionary years, when Mayakovsky created, with Brik's assistance, hundreds of poeticized propaganda posters in support of the Bolshevik revolution.5 Brik also mentioned Mayakovsky's journalistic work, his agit- and commercial poetry. Brik portrayed Mayakovsky as a poet of topical events, as one deeply involved in the political life and problems of his time; and this aspect of Mayakovsky's work did not debase his poetry but, on the contrary, heightened its quality. Brik, however, did not neglect to discuss the distinctive formal characteristics of Mayakovsky's poetry, especially the structure of his striking neologisms

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and the rhythmic orientation of his free verse, which Mayakovsky singled out in "step-ladder" form for force and effect. Once again, however, Brik commented on Mayakovsky's suicide, the cause of which was not "serious," but simply "a tragic accident, a result of great overstrain, which produced a nervous disorder. The revolutionary proletariat has lost one of its greatest poets." 6 After 1932, Brik's articles on Mayakovsky take on the character of an intensive campaign. They begin to proliferate and extend to the remotest regions of the Soviet Union. It is difficult to determine how many articles Brik wrote during the 1930's, particularly in local newspapers beyond Moscow and Leningrad, but the articles listed in the bibliography of Brik's works clearly indicate the nature and scope of the campaign. If Brik wanted Mayakovsky to be studied and recognized, he also wanted his works to be published more frequently in separate editions. In 1932, Brik subtly criticized Gosizdat for its refusal to publish Mayakovsky's "Good" (1927) in a separate edition. He noted that Gosizdat's first edition of that poem contained only three-thousand copies at the expensive cost of two rubles. When the edition sold out quickly, Mayakovsky negotiated with Gosizdat for a second edition, and was willing to accept the minimum author's honorarium so that Gosizdat would reduce the cost to one ruble in an edition of tenthousand copies. The poem was not reissued until after Mayakovsky's death, in the third volume of his collected works which, Brik lamented, was published in only three-thousand copies. The implication, of course, was that another separate edition of "Good" was necessary, and Brik wrote a long essay on the poem, citing those passages that demonstrated Mayakovsky's enthusiastic commitment to the Bolshevik revolution.7 With Lily's assistance, Brik successfully negotiated for a new edition of Mayakovsky's complete works, under Lily's editorship, and the first volume appeared in 1934, a year after the tenth and last volume of his collected works was published. Also in 1934, the Briks published a collection of essays, "Literary Essays on Mayakovsky" ("Almanakh s Mayakovskim"), which is one of the most valuable works on Mayakovsky's life and poetry. One of the contributors to the collection was General Vitaly Primakov, a civil-war hero with strong literary interests. In 1931, Primakov became Lily's third husband. Despite these significant achievements in publishing Mayakovsky's works, Brik continued to press forward for the recognition of

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Mayakovsky's poetry by the literary, poetic, and theatrical circles of the time. In 1933, for example, Brik remarked that Mayakovsky was "alien to our theatres, directors and artists. No theatre, except that of Meyerhold has attempted, with several minor exceptions, to produce his plays 'The Bedbug' and 'The Bathhouse.' Hardly any of our artists read his poetry."8 Two years later, Brik decided to provide critics with certain guidelines for studying Mayakovsky's life and poetry. Brik considered Mayakovsky's life significant "not for the facts of a narrow, personal, private nature, but for the social phenomena that shaped his personality, the great poet of the proletarian revolution." Brik observed that "the literary legacy of Mayakovsky is the richest source of study for any Soviet poet who seeks to be the great master of the art of poetry." Brik suggested that the background of Mayakovsky's poetic beginnings be studied for an understanding of the nature of his revolt. Mayakovsky was connected with Symbolist poetry and the main literary currents of his time, but how, in what way? What was Mayakovsky's relationship to Futurism and how did it help his poetic growth as a poet-rebel? For Brik, these questions required interpretation, "precise and exhausting answers." Brik also touched on Mayakovsky's ties with the Futurists and Formalists in the 1920's, with the journal Lef, with its struggle against the revival of the "old" during the postrevolutionary period. Brik noted that Lefs struggle was well aimed, but its "understanding of the tactics of the class struggle was not deep enough, and therefore Lef was often misguided and hence unable completely to subject its narrow literary interests to the great tasks of the revolutionary struggle. Mayakovsky and his immediate colleagues quickly grasped their mistake and Lef was dissolved." But Brik added that "the experience of the mistake was fruitful. It finally shaped Mayakovsky as a poet who gave himself completely to the revolution."9 Brik no doubt was recanting his own errors at a time when political purges were already underway; and his remarks illustrate his sacrificial distortion of the history of the Futurist movement during the 1920's, a distortion that would ultimately help to shape Soviet criticism on Mayakovsky and on Brik himself. If, however, that distortion was the necessary price for Mayakovsky's recognition, Brik was ready to pay it. But the paramount concern with Mayakovsky's poetic recognition did not make Brik oblivious to the organizational problems and perspectives of Soviet literature in the 1930's; and one of his most daring moves was to question, if not challenge, the new political control and

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regimentation of Soviet writers and to plea for literary diversity. In April 1932, the Communist Party "astounded the Soviet literary world" when it dissolved Rapp and formed a new literary organization, The Union of Soviet Writers, which united all writers and literary groups under the direct control of Party officials.10 The new Union meant the end of all heterogeneous literary groups. For the Party, Rapp had become a narrow and sectarian organization which writers began to equate with the Party itself; and because Rapp had made class ideology the key criterion of membership in its organization, it effectively excluded talented non-proletarian writers, expecially Fellow Travellers, from the tasks of building a socialist society. The Party came to assail Rapp because its slogans were idealistic distortions of Lenin's views on cultural development—which the Party itself had repudiated when it chose Rapp as its literary spokesman—and because Rapp indulged "in abstract manipulation of dialectical concepts instead of producing literary works." 11 In effect, Rapp had become an obstacle to the growth of literature and an unnecessary source of bitter literary controversies. But the Party softened its criticism of Rapp by retaining its leaders as the heads of the new Union, one of whom was Aleksandr Fadeev. Shortly before the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers convened in August 1934, Fadeev spoke of the need for writers to discuss a wide range of literary problems at the Congress. He added, however, that writers could not form literary groups or movements for that purpose, despite the fact that many writers shared common views on literary matters. According to Fadeev, literary groups, like Rapp and Lef, among others, had lost their "historical content," they were "an expression of diverse social groupings," and thus marked the end of an era of literary disagreements and controversies between and among literary groups. The aim of Brik's polemic with Fadeev concerned the value of literary groups within the Union, or, as Brik preferred to call them, "creative associations." How could writers, Brik asked, be prevented from sharing common views on literary problems, and could they be "persecuted" for doing that? Could every literary disagreement constitute a social contradiction? Could a literary disagreement between two communist writers mean that one of them was not a communist? Brik took umbrage at Fadeev's mention of Lef as a "literary organization." Brik pointed out that Lef was a creative association, unlike Rapp, which was liquidated because its "organizational form proved to be too

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crude, too schematic for a socially and politically developed Soviet literature." If, Brik went on tauntingly, Rapp was the expression of proletarian ideology, as Fadeev claimed, how could Rapp have lost its historical content? Brik concluded that Rapp was only one of the forms of the proletarian literary movement. Brik's basic point, however, was that the formation of the Union of Soviet Writers was merely an organizational change; it did not spell the end of literary struggle and debate because not all writers had yet adopted the proletarian viewpoint. The struggle and debate would and should persist within the Union; and the formation of creative associations was one way for writers "to find the path to the literary position of the proletariat." Creative associations would eliminate barriers between writers and foster adherence to creative principles, a sense of common purpose and thought. Writers needed other writers who shared their creative aims. The lack of associations would atomize writers and produce rivalry, not cooperation, between them and leave the impression that all literary problems had been already resolved, or in the process of resolution by authoritative commissions. Writers would no longer need to "rack their brains on creative problems," convinced that their only task would be to write in accord with decisions already made for them. Finally, Brik remarked that "no authoritative commission can debate for writers. Writers themselves must take an active part in it." Creative associations did not imply bureaucratic organizations with regulations, secretaries and offices. The Union did not have to fear the proliferation of literary groups, because its function was to stimulate "an organically developing creative community among writers." The most effective form of such stimulation was to allow creative associations the right to publish their own literary works. The primary purpose of the Union's leadership was to supervise "the literary battles which are indispensable to our growing literature, to see that they do not turn into dangerous squabbles and group fighting."12 When the Congress of the Union Writers convened in August 1934 one of the keynote speakers was Nikolai Bukharin, an eminent Party theoretician, but by now a politically impotent figure who had become one of Stalin's vanquished opponents. Bukharin had been a long-time proponent of competition and diversity in the arts and generally critical of "proletarian culture." Why he was chosen to speak at the Congress is perhaps a matter of conjecture; but his address surely raised the hopes of many Soviet writers for relaxed literary controls, after the

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dark years of Rapp, and for a reconciliation between writers and the Bolshevik regime. In his long address, Bukharin chose poetry as his main subject. After his introductory remarks, he dealt at some length with the Russian Formalist movement, which he criticized for its "attempts, on principle, to free art from its vital social context," and for confusing the specific nature of art with its complete autonomy. For Bukharin, the sociological mainsprings of art were integral to formalist studies. Yet Bukharin's criticism, however misguided, also affirmed the critical importance of formal studies on poetic rhythm, meter and language. He noted that a "purely nihilistic attitude" of many Marxists to the formal problems of art was "entirely wrong." He added: "An integral science of literature must include the elucidation of the laws of literature as a whole, as an active function in the life of society, as a 'superstructure' of a particular kind, and this should include the laws, conditionally speaking, of the 'formal elements' as well." 13 Bukharin then proceeded to discuss at greater length the themes, qualities and contributions of the leading pre- and post-revolutionary Russian poets. When he came to Mayakovsky, Bukharin characterized him as a "stupendous" poet of "striking innovation," whose poetry was one of "action," a "hailstorm of sharp arrows shot against the enemy. It is a devastating, fire-belching lava" directed against "the life of the philistine" and "the suffocating mustiness of bureaucracy." Mayakovsky's influence and contribution were so overwhelming that he had already "become a Soviet 'classic'." 14 Despite his genuine admiration for Mayakovsky as a "great man" and poet, Bukharin felt, however, that Mayakovsky's "rhymed slogans," "Bohemianism" and agitational poetry would now represent a decline in poetic culture, no longer relevant to the period, and no substitute for poetry of a "classical" nature. What Bukharin wanted in poetry was richness in feelings, associations, emotions and ideas; and because the complexity of life had changed and raised new cultural needs and problems, "time has set its stamp" on Mayakovsky. 15 If there was a poet who met Bukharin's "classical" criteria for poetic originality and craftsmanship, it was Boris Pasternak, "a singer of the old intelligentsia." Bukharin observed that, despite the "egocentric" and "subjective" nature of Pasternak's poetry, despite his alienation from contemporary life, Pasternak rejected the trite, hackneyed and rhymed prose of other poets. The freshness and breath of his poetry made Pasternak "one of the most remarkable masters of verse of our

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time who has written a number of profoundly sincere revolutionary pieces."16 Bukharin's courageous praise of Pasternak was related to his appeal for poetic diversity and was intended to defend the right of unorthodox and apolitical poets to write on lyric themes. Bukharin's final observations on the growth and development of a literature of "humanism" clearly echoed some of Brik's views. He pointed out the "grave danger" of bureaucratic and compulsory measures to develop art, which would "not be art at all." Soviet literature, to be worthy of the name, required "a wide freedom of competition in creative questing" and qualitative diversity, embracing "the entire world of emotions—love, happiness, fear, anguish, anger, and so on to infinity—the entire world of desire and passion . . ,"17 Brik's eager hopes, and those of many others, however, for literary heterodoxy and for a resurgence of Futurism and Formalism as "creative associations" within the Union of Writers were quickly dashed by the Congress, which saw no semblance of any literary debate, but the imposition of a new set of political-literary criteria—Socialist Realism—to ensure conformity to them by all writers. After the Congress, Brik wrote no articles on Mayakovsky until April 1935, some eight months later; and when he resumed his writing, he dealt with the relevance of Mayakovsky's poetry to the immediate period. That Brik consciously waged a polemic with Bukharin on the negative aspects of Mayakovsky's poetry is doubtful.18 Three of Brik's articles in April 1934 are worthy of mention. One noted that "the study of the whole creative workshop of the greatest poet of the revolution is the most urgent task of Soviet literary criticism." In another article, Brik pointed out the value of Mayakovsky's work, "How to Make Poetry," which Brik viewed as "an indispensible guide for any beginning poet. Hardly anywhere in world literature will one find a document which bares the mechanics of writing poetry with such clarity and concreteness."19 Elsewhere, Brik hoped to demonstrate the relevance of Mayakovsky's poetry to the time. He challenged the view that Mayakovsky's poetry, in light of its impressive qualities, was "obsolete," simply because the facts and events of which Mayakovsky wrote were of the past. Brik posed these questions: "Have all the remnants of capitalism and philistinism been eradicated from our conscience? Has all that Mayakovsky struggled against been removed from Soviet reality? Of course, not."20 In November 1935, however, Brik came to a decision of far-reaching significance that determined his own personal, and Mayakovsky's

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poetic, fate in the Soviet Union: to make a direct appeal to Stalin concerning the neglected political value of Mayakovsky's poetry to the Soviet Union. Two essential factors shaped his decision. The first was the wave of political purges that led to the arrests and the impending arrests of Brik's Futurist colleagues and associates, namely, Nikolai Punin, Boris Kushner, Boris Malkin, Nikolai Chuzhak, Sergei Tretyakov, among others. Brik could not but feel that he, too, was potentially a marked man, especially in the light of his previous writings and association with Russian Formalism, which made him highly vulnerable. But Brik did have the timely protection of his close friend, General Primakov, Lily's husband, who in 1935 was a member of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad Soviet and the Deputy Commander of the Military District of Leningrad, where the Briks lived at the time. Secondly, Primakov served as a vital source of information on political events, and probably advised Brik on the course of action. Yet, despite all his military and political connections, Primakov himself became a tragic victim of the purges of the Soviet military in August 1936, when he was arrested and subsequently shot without trial. Composing the letter to Stalin was left to Lily Brik; and although it bore her signature alone, Brik and Primakov undoubtedly had a definite hand in it. Around November 25, Primakov went to Moscow to deliver the letter personally to the military security at the Kremlin. It is quite likely, if not probable that, without Primakov's delivery, the letter would never have reached Stalin's personal attention. In her letter, Lily firmly linked herself to Mayakovsky's poetic legacy. She remarked that she possessed all of Mayakovsky's rough drafts, manuscripts, notebooks and other materials "connected with perpetuating his memory." She was now in the process of editing those materials so as to satisfy the growing interest in Mayakovsky's poetry which, in her assessment, was "wholly, absolutely topical and a most powerful revolutionary instrument. He remains the most outstanding poet of our revolution, but far from everybody understands that." Lily then went on to complain of the prevailing institutionalized insensitivity to Mayakovsky and his poetry. Gosizdat only published ten-thousand copies of each volume of Mayakovsky's collected works, which made it impossible to obtain them in bookstores. Materials for another volume of his poetry were sent to Gosizdat "long ago," but they had not been prepared for press. A proposal to make a model of Mayakovsky's working study at the Communist Academy, where all his materials would be preserved, never materialized. Another proposal to

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restore his apartment—in which the Briks also lived—and to create a regional library in Mayakovsky's name was rejected by the Moscow Council for lack of funds. "It is a pity," Lily wrote, "to let these matters go while we are still alive." She mentioned the many fruitless discussions that had been held to rename certain streets after Mayakovsky. A recent decision by the Commissar of Education deleted Mayakovsky's "Good" and "Lenin" from a textbook on contemporary Soviet literature for Russian schools. For Lily, all this amply demonstrated that the Soviet bureaucracy underestimated Mayakovsky's "agitational role" and "revolutionary topicalness," and the "exclusive interest" of Soviet youth in his works. Only the loss of Mayakovsky's materials would arouse concern, but then it would be too late to preserve his memory for growing generations. Lily concluded her letter: "I alone cannot overcome this bureaucratic lack of interest and resistence, and after six years of work I turn to you, since I see no other way of realizing Mayakovsky's enormous revolutionary heritage."21 Stalin did not reply directly to Lily, but forwarded her letter with the following note to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police: Please direct your attention to Brik's letter. Mayakovsky was and remains the best, most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his memory and his work is a crime. In my opinion, Brik's complaints are justified. Get in touch with her (Brik) or call her to Moscow. Enlist the services of Tol and Mekhlis in the matter, and please do all that we have neglected. If you need my help, I'm ready. Regards, Stalin.22 There are two basic factors in Stalin's elevation of Mayakovsky as "the best, most talented poet" of the Soviet period. First, the Soviet state needed a "model" political poet for emulation, and Mayakovsky's political poetry met the criteria of Socialist Realism, although the "other" Mayakovsky, whose poetry railed against the daily grind and the bureaucratization of Soviet life, not to mention the strong lyric tendency of that poetry, was no longer conceivable. Second, unlike Lenin, whose initial hostility to Mayakovsky later changed to ambivalence, Stalin obviously harbored for many years an admiration for Mayakovsky as both man and poet. Reportedly, on April 14, 1930, after learning of Mayakovsky's suicide, Stalin left his office to read Mayakovsky's poetry to his children. Stalin's authoritative pronouncement now assured Mayakovsky

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a permanent place in the history of Soviet poetry. His name began to spread like a forest fire throughout the Soviet Union and has become a daily encounter in, and feature of, Soviet life in terms of the streets, schools, squares, stations and museums that bear his name. His life and work have become the subject of countless studies which have essentially stressed his civic and political commitment to the Bolshevik regime, to the extent that no other modern poet or writer enjoys the immense popularity and political identification of Mayakovsky.23 That is the way Mayakovsky wanted it, Brik was convinced, and he was far from wrong. As for the Briks, they were for the time being solidly, but not permanently—as historical fortunes go—linked with Mayakovsky; and it was a link which, one can safely say, saved Brik from the political purges, for he and Lily, together with the Mayakovsky family, were mainly in charge of redeeming the Soviet state of its admitted neglect of Mayakovsky, and for preparing his works for the mass publications that ensued. For Brik, the battle had ended triumphantly. For Lily, the battle to establish her own role in, and perspective of, Mayakovsky's poetic legacy had just begun; but the political elevation of Mayakovsky was the necessary prelude to her own battle which continues to this very day. After 1936, the propagation of Mayakovsky in the Soviet Union assumed the form of a thriving industry which Lily's letter to Stalin had suddenly generated. The majority of Brik's articles joined the growing chorus of hosannas to Mayakovsky; and in one of his articles in 1938, Brik felt that Mayakovsky had been resurrected from the dead: "Mayakovsky is alive, more alive than many of the living. His poetry is read today as though it has just been written. It is no wonder that his poetry is read here, there and everywhere. The whole of the Soviet people reads his poetry because it is that of a genuine people's poet."24 Brik could now take issue with Western critics who held that Mayakovsky's "poetic remark" in 1930, "But I subdued myself repeatedly, standing on the throat of my own song," was the key to understanding his tragic suicide because he blunted the lyric and critical thrust of his poetry, or, as Brik put it, "Mayakovsky did not write the poetry that he really wanted to." For Brik, this interpretation was "complete nonsense and contradicts the entire creative practice of Mayakovsky." Brik saw the significance of the remark in its "appeal to poets to resist the temptation of the easy, well-trodden path of romance lyrics" and "to cultivate in oneself the poet-fighter, the poet as an

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active builder of socialism. And if it is necessary at times to overcome in oneself personal, highly individualistic impulses, then one must do this with complete Bolshevik vigor, 'by standing on the throat of one's own song'."25 It is difficult to determine the extent of Brik's awareness that the exclusive political emphasis on Mayakovsky's poetry would permanently distort it. The political context of the time, which drew Brik into its vortex, surely pointed to that emphasis, especially before Stalin's pronouncement. After 1936 however, it became possible to focus on other aspects of Mayakovsky's poetry, namely its critical orientation and its formal and linguistic features. In 1936, for example, Brik noted that political necessity often led Mayakovsky to struggle against the dangers of bureaucracy and petty-philistinism "with the whole might of his poetry." 26 That assertion, of course, could not seriously or realistically envision any negative criticism of the Stalinist bureaucracy. But in illuminating Mayakovsky's poetry, Brik was productive. In 1936, he assisted his Futurist colleague, Vladimir Trenin, in his brilliant study — Mayakovsky's Poetic Workshop (1937)—of the formal and linguistic innovations of Mayakovsky's poetry, which is perhaps the best formalist study on Mayakovsky in the Soviet Union. It is quite probable that Trenin's study could not have been published before Stalin's pronouncement on Mayakovsky. Brik made his own special contribution to the study of Mayakovsky's poetic origins by establishing a solid and fruitful link between Mayakovsky and the Symbolist poet, Aleksandr Blok. According to Brik, of all the pre-revolutionary Russian poets, Blok played the most significant role in Mayakovsky's poetic development. Blok's social alarm or anxiety, his acute premonition of future catastrophe, his appeal for vigilance in the face of it, found new expression and formulation in Mayakovsky's poetry. Unlike Blok, Mayakovsky viewed future events, particularly the impending revolution, not as a "danger, but as a desired freedom." Brik noted that Mayakovsky's play, "Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy" (1913), had its point of departure in Blok's play, "The King in the Square" (1906), among other similarities between their works. Finally, Brik observed that Mayakovsky's conversational, tonic poetry was largely based on Blok's prose.27 When the popularity of Mayakovsky resulted in many public readings of his poetry, Brik, who attended many of the readings, felt that Mayakovsky's poetry was often misread and garbled, and he wrote a set of general guidelines on the proper reading of his poetry:

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1. One should not read Mayakovsky's poetry without a complete understanding of its logical and grammatical meaning. 2. One must pronounce the words correctly and not confuse, misinterpret the stresses, particularly in rhymed words. The rhythm and sound structure of the poem must be carefully analyzed before reading it. 3. One should not play with Mayakovsky's poetry, or shape it to suit one's purposes. It is one thing to change individual expressions and another to modify them to one's purposes. 4. One should not imagine oneself as Mayakovsky when reading his poetry. He is simple to read, and the only task is to convey the poem's meaning clearly and intelligently 'to the ear.' 28 During his last years, Brik worked as a script writer and lecturer for film studios. His articles concerning film scripts tend to reflect his frustration with their quality, largely due to the constricting and unimaginative atmosphere that prevailed in the film studios. In one of his articles, he urged free and open discussion of film scripts: "A writer can work only in a creative environment, and, consequently, if we want to have in the portfolios of our film studios high quality film scripts, then we must place our work under the fixed attention of society. The film scripts must have the right to be criticized."29 On June 22, 1941 Brik and Evgeniya Zhemchuzhnaya entered a restaurant in the Caucasus, where they learned of the German invasion of Russia. When the waitress asked Brik for his order, he paused for a moment and then angrily shouted: "No, we shall not order anything." According to Evgeniya, this was the first and only expression of Brik's anger in her entire life with him.30 During the war, Brik worked for the "Windows" of the Russian Telegraph Agency (Tass) in Moscow, which employed artists, poets and writers for making propaganda posters in the struggle against the German army.31 On February 22, 1945 Brik was returning to his apartment; and as he reached the third flight of stairs with his usual swiftness, he suddenly collapsed and died of a heart attack. His body remained on the stairway for some time. When it was discovered, Evgeniya and a friend carried it to the fifth-floor apartment. Shortly after, Brik was cremated. Tass published a fitting obituary of Brik, which was signed by ninety prominent figures from the art world as a whole, among them: Pasternak, Aseev, Fadeev, Ehrenburg, Shklovsky, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and

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Kruchonykh. The obituary stressed the extraordinary diversity of Brik's talents and activities throughout his life, his impressive contributions to the study of Russian poetry, his "untiring readiness to be useful in the creation of Soviet culture," and his intellectual integrity. Brik's role in Mayakovsky's poetic career was also singled out, particularly Brik's publication of "A Cloud in Trousers," which led to the recognition of Mayakovsky as a major poet. The obituary concluded: "His name [Brik's] is inseparably linked with the name of the great Mayakovsky and will firmly go down in the history of Soviet literature." 32 Unfortunately, that was not to be. A sizeable company attended Brik's funeral at the Novo-Devichy Cemetery in Moscow. There, in the wall of the Cemetery, his remains lie in an urn with a glass shield, a short distance away from the large and imposing statue of Mayakovsky over his own remains. There was one notable incident after the funeral ceremony, when Shklovsky broke down and cried out: "Farewell, dear friend, we are all indebted to you."

CHAPTER FIVE

For the next thirteen years, until 1958, Brik became an ambiguous and curious figure in the history of Soviet literature, despite his leading role in it during the 1920's. His unorthodox views and his close association with the already vilified Russian Formalist movement, which he organized, vigorously supported and never repudiated, were undoubtedly related to his obscurity. Although Brik was often mentioned—rarely positively, if ever—in studies on Soviet literature and especially on Mayakovsky, he never received any significant attention or study. Ironically, the exalted status of Mayakovsky, almost exclusively a result of Brik's persistent efforts, created the complex problem for Soviet literary criticism of determining Brik's own role in Soviet literature and in Mayakovsky's life and work; and that role had to be played down and considered negative and harmful. If, the view went, Mayakovsky had fully realized the corrupting influence of Brik, the Futurists and Formalists and their Bohemianism, he would have discovered his true path and calling, with the implication that he might have been saved from suicide. Thus the clear tendency was to separate Mayakovsky from Brik, the Futurists and Formalists. In 1958, however, an extremely important collection of materials and essays—"New Light on Mayakovsky"—ran counter to that tendency and reasserted the prominent role of the Briks, especially Lily's, in Maykovsky's life and work. The book appeared in a climate of relaxed literary and political controls that followed Khrushchev's deStalinization campaign in 1956. There can be no doubt that Lily was a main inspiration for the conception of the book, which marked her first major efforts to redress the historical perspective on Mayakovsky—to de-emphasize the political direction of his poetry—and to project herself as the supreme love in his life. In doing that, Lily also indirectly brought to the fore Brik himself, including the Futurist and Formalist movements with which Mayakovsky was closely connected.

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In the introduction to the book, the editorial staff noted that the publication of one-hundred fifty letters of Mayakovsky to Lily Brik was "an extraordinary epistolary cycle" of biographical and literary interest. "Mayakovsky the lyric poet, the man of great feeling, is unfolded in these letters from a new standpoint. Moreover, the letters contain a great deal of information and factual data indispensible to Maykovsky's researchers."1 The letters did overwhelmingly confirm Lily as Mayakovsky's supreme love, and Brik as a confidant and deeply loved friend, since he was almost invariably mentioned in every letter to Lily. The intimate photographs of Mayakovsky and Lily, Mayakovsky's tender protrait of Lily in 1915, photographs of a contented Mayakovsky among Futurists and Formalists, and one in particular with Brik—these could only reinforce the impression that Mayakovsky was naturally among and with his very own.2 This publication, the first of two volumes of new materials on Mayakovsky, cogently demonstrated the role and significance of the Briks in Mayakovsky's life and work, and restored the historical record with a singel stroke. While Soviet scholars reviewed the publication on Mayakovsky positively, an ominous anonymous article - "Against the Distortion of Historical Truth"—saw the publication as a threat to the political fundamentals of Soviet literary criticism and to the established political image of Mayakovsky. The article noted that in some fields of scholarly research on Soviet literature "serious errors prevent the fruitful study of our Soviet literary development." This remark related directly to Dinershtein's article on Mayakovsky's political activities during the immediate pre- and post-revolutionary period, which presented "a distorted view of the cast of mind the great poet of the October revolution, depicting him as a man who in certain periods was ostensibly in conflict with Soviet reality. These materials smack of the fabrications of foreign revisionists." The excessive attention to the personal facts of Mayakovsky's life led to an exaggerated view of their significance and could not illuminate his creative art, but only cater to the vulgar tastes of philistines who "crave a glimpse of a prominent person in slippers and robe, or else in a negligee, so as to reduce that person to their own level." The article then pointed out this reminder: "The self-contained, blind enthusiasm for achival 'first discovery' compels other scholars to forget at times also the zeal of Mayakovsky's poetry, and the decisive factor in the creative evolution of the poet—his inexorable aspiration to serve the revolution and the proletariat." The article also found the publication of Mayakovsky's letters to Lily

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bewildering because they were largely personal and businesslike, of no relationship to literature and of no scientific interest. It hardly occurred to Mayakovsky when he wrote the letters that they would come to the attention of "strangers." "Isn't this tactless in relation to the poet's memory? Isn't it a violation of his will, even if he never expressed it directly?"3 But "New Light on Mayakovsky" had already become part of the historical truth; it created an impact and momentum of its own. The year 1963 saw another valuable collection of materials—"V. V. Mayakovsky in the Recollections of His Contemporaries"—which also devoted a great deal of attention to the Briks and their salutary role in Mayakovsky's life and work.4 Three years later, Lily herself cast additional light on Mayakovsky's poetry in a fascinating article in a leading scholarly journal of Soviet literary criticism. She suggested to scholars that Mayakovsky's poetry be studied in the light of Dostoevsky's novels. Her own investigation of the relationship revealed striking parallels between their works.5 The social, political and philosophical rebellion of Dostoevsky's characters—with whom Mayakovsky strongly identified — and their desire for suffering resonated in Mayakovsky's (early) poetry. A commentary by a Soviet scholar directly followed Lily's article; and he found Lily's observations "more or less convincing in favor of the thesis" and noted the added relevance of her article: "It is imporant also to say something about the more general significance of L. Brik's 'Suggestion.' We often write about Dostoevsky's influence on foreign wirters. But the traditions of that great writer in Russian literature itself have remained uninvestigated, not even projected. And, of course, the problem of 'Dostoevsky and Mayakovsky'can in reality be solved only in connection with the solution of a much larger problem: Dostoevsky and Russian literature of the 20-th century."6 Lily's successful efforts, however, to recover own, and to a somewhat equal extent Brik's, role in Mayakovsky's life and to chart new directions for the frutiful study of his poetry did not and could not go unchallenged. For what she essentially did in some ten years was to threaten or erode the political image of Mayakovsky—and this is perhaps the supreme irony—that she and especially Brik had so firmly shaped in the Soviet Union. In 1968, the reaction came with unusual vengeance. Two articles in a popular magazine of mass circulation tried to come to grips with the role and significance of the Briks in Mayakovsky's life and work. As Brown accurately describes it, "The primary purpose of the two articles

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was to destroy Lily Brik as the great love of Mayakovsky's life in order to install in her place a 'true Russian' girl (not a Jew, of course), Tatiana Yakovleva."7 The other basic aim was to vilify Brik, to depict him not as Mayakovsky's confidant and friend, but a his consummate enemy. These two articles invite close examination in terms of their objective and cogent evidence and the omission of available evidence. First, however, the identity of the two authors of the articles should be mentioned. They were wirtten by A. Vorontsov and A. Koloskov. The former, who curiously co-authored only the first article, seems to be a high Party functionary. Koloskov is basically a journalist with scholarly aspirations, a close associate of Mayakovsky's sister, Lyudmilla, who has publicly flaunted her venomous hatred for Lily.8 With her backing, Koloskov became in 1940 the Director of the Mayakovsky Museum in Kutaisi, Georgia, where Mayakovsky was born. In the late 1930's, Koloskov also served on the editorial staff for the second edition of Mayakovsky's complete works. In 1950, he wrote a work on Mayakovsky—"The Life of Mayakovsky 1893-1930"—which never received any scholarly recognition in the Soviet Union. Of particular note in that book was Koloskov's remark that Trotsky, Voronsky and Averbakh were responsible for Mayakovsky's suicide.9 In 1958, Koloskov wrote another work—"Mayakovsky in the Struggle for Communism"—the aim of which was "to show Mayakovsky's part in the historical struggle for the establishment of the communist regime in our country, in the triumph of the great ideas of communism."10 When a scholarly authority on Mayakovsky negatively reviewed Koloskov's book in an Academy of Sciences publication, he made a number of key observations which are germane to Koloskov's articles on the Briks. The most critical was Koloskov's use of "unscientific methods of presenting evidence," his "arbitrary deletions" from Mayakovsky's statements, and his "attempts to place on the Procrustean bed of his far-fetched scheme whole works of Mayakovsky and even periods of the poet's creative work. A. Koloskov erases the boundary between various periods of his work by arbitrarily endowing, for example, 'A Cloud' or 'War and the Universe' with the ideological-political maturity that Mayakovsky achieved only in his much later works."11 Vorontsov's and Koloskov's first article—"The Love of the Poet"—deals with Mayakovsky's passionate love affair with the tall, elegant and beautiful Tatyana Yakovleva. Born in 1906 in Russia, Tatyana emigrated to Paris in 1925 for reasons of health (tuberculosis) She soon became associated with the haut monde of Paris and was

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widely pursued. In late October 1928 Tatyana, "decked in furs and beads," was introduced to Mayakovsky, who thereafter courted her almost for about two weeks. The warm and novel affair with the enchanting and talented poet was for Tatyana an exciting relief from the superficial and pompous character of the haut monde; and it naturally aroused Tatyana's deep affection for Mayakovsky, an affection that did not quite approach the intensity of his love for her, and also strong yearnings for her native country, which she seemed to equate with Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky tried to persuade Tatyana to return to Moscow with him, perhaps as his wife or in some other capacity, but she was reluctant to do so. Mayakovsky recorded his love for Tatyana in two moving lyric poems, "A Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris on the Essence of Love" and "A Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva," which he presented to her just prior to his departure from Paris on December 3, 1928. Mayakovsky published the first poem in January 1929. The second poem was published posthumously. Why he did not publish it is a matter for conjecture. In that poem, Mayakovsky once again urged Tatyana to return to Russia, but he was quite aware of her reluctance: Don't think about it, by simply screwing up your eyes from under your straightened eyebrows. Come here, come to the crossroads of my big and clumsy arms. You don't want to? Stay then and spend the winter there, and this affront we'll chalk up to the general account. Anyway I'll someday take you back — alone or together with Paris.12 As noted above, Tatyana's unattainability provided a lyric "release" for Mayakovsky; it posed a great challenge to his ego, to the extent that he actually returned to Paris on February 29, 1929 to resume his love affair with Tatyana. This critical fact Vorontsov and Koloskov either

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forget or choose to ignore. Mayakovsky obviously tried again to bring Tatyana back to Russia, but after remaining in Paris until May 2,1929, he failed. How much time and love did Mayakovsky need to persuade Tatyana, and what does his failure say about her own feelings about him and the matter as a whole? Interestingly, no poetic "lyric" release followed his second stay in Paris, but it found expression in his correspondence with her. After returning to Moscow, Mayakovsky began to work on his play, "The Bathhouse," and became immersed in personal "troubles." He wrote about six letters and twenty-five telegrams to Tatyana, in which he expressed his anguished loneliness for her and his desire to return to her in Paris.13 He even asked her to come to Russia, a request that she did not take seriously. Mayakovsky did mention that he would return to Paris in October 1929, but by then Tatyana had already accepted a marriage proposal by a French diplomat, Vicomte du Plessix, and later moved to Warsaw. Vorontsov and Koloskov comment on her marriage in interesting language: "We have formed the impression that Tatyana did not love du Plessix, but with Mayakovsky she had a true love, and it has seemed to us that they were created for each other." 14 Perhaps they were, but only in Paris. Presumably, Tatyana answered Mayakovsky's correspondence, but her letters have not survived. Vorontsov and Koloskov claim that "Some evil hand [i. e. Lily] destroyed them. They could confirm how much Mayakovsky was right in calling her 'my own'." 15 They are probably right about the latter, but not the former. Tatyana's correspondence with her mother in Russia is perhaps more illuminating concerning her real attitude to Mayakovsky. That she did not want to return to Russia is a central issue that Vorontsov and Koloskov refuse to confront. As Brown notes, Tatyana's "letters reveal not a trace of passionate self-surrender, nor any evidence that she was ready to follow her lover back to the Soviet Union. The affair came to abrupt end, though certain details are still obscure."16 Vorontsov and Koloskov have published Tatyana's letters to her mother with a view to supporting their argument, but in reality the letters refute it. In one letter, Tatyana remarked that Mayakovsky evoked in her such a longing for Russia that "I almost returned." She assured her mother that her relationship with the poet was "no hopeless love;" and however strong Mayakovsky's feelings for her, she could not "help returning them, if only a little bit." One letter in particular reveals vividly her confused and torn feelings: "In general, I really don't feel like getting married now. I'm too used to my freedom

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and independence to make hats in my 'greenhouse'.. . They want to take me to various countries, but everything else is nothing in comparison with Mayakovsky. Of course, I would rather choose him. How bright he is! . . . My life is full of romantic involvements [U menya massa dram]. Even if I wanted to be with Mayakovsky, then what would happen to Ilya, and besides him there is yet another. It's a vicious circle."17 Vorontsov and Koloskov go on to point out that Mayakovsky was quite anxious to return to Paris in October 1929 so as to bring Tatyana back as his wife and thus avoid his tragic fate. Mayakovsky "thirsted for love" because he was unhappy with Lily, who was, after fifteen years, only "an infatuation" (uvlechenie). The fact that Mayakovsky failed to persuade Tatyana to return to Russia on two previous occasions is dismissed. Vorontsov and Koloskov then advance a new argument: Mayakovsky was denied a visa to return to Paris and was thus deprived of his true love in life. In granting them the benefit of the doubt, the visa itself cannot be a measure of Mayakovsky's success in persuading Tatyana to return, or that she would have returned unreluctantly. As to who prevented Mayakovsky from obtaining a visa or whether he in fact applied for one is left unanswered, but strongly implied by a gratuitous question: "And isn't it strange that only five months after Mayakovsky was refused a visa the Briks took a long trip abroad?"18 We are led to believe that because the Briks were able to obtain a visa, Mayakovsky was somehow not, or that the Briks were able to deny him a visa. But the interesting fact of the Briks' trip to England is that it was attacked in the press, and that Mayakovsky publicly defended it, and perhaps even obtained the visa for them. Vorontsov and Koloskov ignore that; and what is truly strange is their assertion that, since Mayakovsky was so popular among the Party leaders he could not have been denied a visa upon direct request. Thus the Briks had mysterious political powers over and above the Party leaders themselves! As for the role of Veronika Polonskaya in Mayakovsky's life, Vorontsov and Koloskov also consider her "an infatuation" because, as they explain, Mayakovsky's love for Tatyana was so strong and overwhelming that he simply could not have fallen in love with Veronika so quickly. If that is so, then Mayakovsky surely would or should have included Tatyana in his suicide note as a member of his "family." But in citing that note, Vorontsov and Koloskov delete that portion of the note where Mayakovsky singled out Lily and Veronika, including his mother and sisters, as his own.19 Tatyana had curiously evaporated from Mayakovsky's memory.

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Having disposed of Lily, Koloskov then directs his attack against Brik. He seeks to demonstrate that Mayakovsky's literary circle consisted of "illusory friends," who in effect turned out to be his real enemies. Koloskov portrays Brik as Mayakovsky's arch enemy, as a vulgar anti-Marxist, as an unprincipled opportunist and a formalist theoretician who sought "to liquidate art." Brik becomes the principal obstacle to Mayakovsky's efforts in the 1920's "to unite forces which would help to defend the revolutionary, Party line in literature and and art." Because Mayakovsky uncritically confided in Brik, he was deflected from the true path and personally suffered.20 Koloskov's final ovservations serve to solidify the suggestion that the Briks bear responsibility for Mayakovsky's death and to deter any further study and mention of the role of the Briks in Mayakovsky's life and poetry: "Many important facts had to be excluded from this publication, since they concern 'living people.' But is it possible to be silent any longer when the matter concerns the mystery of the death of the great poet of our century? . . . Unfortunately, at the present time we are unable to say who is the criminal, who is the swine. We know that they [the Briks?] were the enemies of Mayakovsky, the enemies of communism. We are still unable to name precisely who prepared the shot that led to the death of the great poet. We are confident, however, that the time will come."21 This is the threat that still hovers over Lily's head and demonstrates the extent to which Koloskov has been singularly successful in the Soviet Union in vilifying the Briks and in consigning them to historical oblivion.22 Koloskov's articles, however, mark only a temporary victory in the long and intensive struggle that will continually rage over Mayakovsky's literary and "personal" legacy. Lily's struggle, therefore, also continues, not so much in the Soviet Union as beyond it, where a number of publications since 1968 have emphasized her role in Mayakovsky's life and work.23 Perhaps Lily is not quite aware that her own struggle is, in the final analysis, directed not against her "enemies" but, ironically, against Brik himself, who has partly created her dilemma. The ultimate victor in the struggle over Mayakovsky's legacy appears to be Brik, for he unquestionably bears the major responsibility for Mayakovsky's fame in the Soviet Union; and in that considerable achievement, Brik perhaps consciously realized, with himself as the sacrificial victim, his consuming vision of merging art—Mayakovsky—and life.

NOTES

Chapter One 1 "He read so much that it seemed that he had read everything." P. Neznamov, "Mayakovsky v 20-kh godakh," in V. V. Mayakovsky v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1963), p. 362. According to his unpublished memoirs, Katanyan remarks that Brik "read mountains of books." "Ne tolko vospominaniya," p. 2. 2 As Roman Jakobson describes Brik: "An ability for strict, consistent analysis with clear-cut definitions and a constant propensity for steadfast, bold, sometimes paradoxical schematization are the most striking features of his thought." "Postcript" to "Two Essays on Poetic Language," in Michigan Slavic Materials, No. 5 (Ann Arbor, 1964), p. 79. 3 See Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkely, 1968), p. 312. 4 Ibid, p. 315. 5 In one of her more penetrating remarks, Nadezhda Mandelstam notes that "Mayakovski certainly had a lot to thank Brik for; without him he would not have found such compensation in the writing of propaganda verse. This postponed his end, giving him purpose in life and the sense of power so essential to a person of his temperament" (Hope Abandoned, p. 42). Markov observes that Mayakovsky "was a supreme poetic intellect, which resulted in his giving his unique poetic shape to any topic essayed, whether love for Lilya or for Lenin, praise of baby pacifiers in a rhymed ad, or invention of an obscene impromptu. From this viewpoint, there is no truth in the statement that Mayakovsky destroyed the poet in himself by writing editorials in verse" (Russian Futurism..., p. 315). 6 V. V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, I (Moscow, 1955), p. 23. 7 L. Brik, "Iz vospominanii," in Almanakh s Mayakovskim (Moscow, 1933), p. 62. 8 Ibid. 9 O. M. Brik, "KHLEBa," in Vzyal: Baraban futuristov (Peterburg, 1915), p. 13. 10 This point is well made by Roman Jakobson, p. 79. He writes that this lack of ambition was possibly "the only thing which hindered Brik from becoming a professional scholar of renown . . ." Brik was a scholar in his own right. Many of his formalistic works remain unpublished. He never found himself in the proper circumstances to develop as a renowned scholar. His struggle to achieve his own vision of literature, art and poetry in Soviet society largely conditioned the publicistic orientation and polemical bent of his work. 11 Mayakovsky, I, p. 24. 12 L. Brik, "Vospominaniya" (unpublished), p. 19. 13 See "Pisma Mayakovskogo k L. Yu. Brik," in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, LXV (Moscow, 1958), p. 101. 14 There seems to be some question as to who actually obtained Mayakovsky's

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NOTES position at the atuo school. According to Dinershtein, it was either Maksim Gorky or the artist A . Radakov. "Mayakovsky v fevrale—oktyabre 1917 g.," in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, L X V (Moscow, 1958), p. 541. According to V. Pertsov, it was Gorky who obtained the position, Mayakovsky: Zhizn i tvorchestvo do velikoi oktyabriskoi revolyutsii (Moscow, 1951), p. 330. Pertsov's interest in maximizing Gorky's, and in minimizing Brik's role in Mayakovsky's life is quite understandable. A n authoritative source has identified Brik as the principal agent in obtaining the position for Mayakovsky.

15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

Mayakovsky, I, p. 24. See Dinershtein, p. 542. See L. Brik, p. 66, and Viktor Shklovsky, Tretya fabrika (Moscow, 1926), p. 58. Shklovsky, p. 59. Shklovsky goes on to remark that "Even if Brik had begun to refuse [to go to the front] and had shed blood before the military authorities, they would have sent him just the same" (p. 58). One could argue that if Gorky had saved Mayakovsky from going to the front, he could have also intervened for Brik. Perhaps Gorky did not have enough time, or did not want to? Perhaps the question is academic. When Shklovsky first came to the Brik-Mayakovsky apartment, he remarks that its opening for him "was not a door, but the cover of a book. I opened the book called 'The Story of the Life of Osip and Lily Brik'." For Shklovsky, Osip Brik "stood on the first page." (p. 57) Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine, 3rd ed. (The Hague, 1969), p. 69. L. Brik, "Vospominaniya," p. 18. Ibid, p. 19. Katanyan, p. 1, 3. See Nauchnye izvestiya: filosofiya, literatura, iskusstvo, II (Moscow, 1922), pp. 287-306 for some of the activities of various linguistic circles at the time. See W. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakosvky (New York, 1970), pp. 144-145. Mayakovsky, I, p. 23. Dinershtein, pp. 543-544.1 am indebted to Dinershtein's account for some of the events after February 1917. Ibid., p. 544. Ibid. As cited in Ibid., p. 546. Ibid., pp. 547-548. Ibid., p. 548. A s cited in Ibid., pp. 552-553. Ibid., p. 550. See Ibid., pp. 551. See Russkaya volya, March 28, 1917. For Lunacharsky's highly positive assessment of Mayakovsky during this period, see "Pervaya vstrecha Lunacharskogo s Mayakovskim v 1917 g.," in Literatumoe nasledstvo, L X V , p. 571. Ibid. See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923,1 (New York, 1951), p. 89. Interestingly, after the Bolshevik revolution, many Proletkult poets were actually imitating, much to the chagrin of Proletkult's leaders, the Futurist poets, not the Russian classics. In particular, Mayakovsky exerted a large influence. One very popular Proletkult poet, Aleksei Gastev, apparently echoed the Futurists when he noted that " W e do not want to be prophets, but in any case we must bind the stunning revolution of artistic methods with proletarian art." See S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky (New York, 1970), pp. 99-100.

NOTES

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41 I. Smimov, "K istorii Proletkulta," Voprosy literatury, No. 1, 1968, p. 116. 42 See E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country 1924-1926, I (London, 1958), pp. 62-63. 43 For additional views on Proletkult, see the excellent study by Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories 1917-1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism (Berkely, 1963), pp. 9-26. See also Fitzpatrick, pp. 89-109. For Bogdanov's views, see his popular Elementy proletarskoi kultury v razvitii rabochego klassa (Moscow, 1919). 44 See Dinershtein, pp. 554-555. 45 See Boris Malkin, "Vospominaniya," Izvestiya, April 12, 1937. 46 Dinershtein, p. 564. 47 Ibid., p. 566, 569. 48 O. Brik, "Mayakovsky—redaktor i organizator," Literatumye kritik, No. 4, 1936, p. 116. 49 As cited in Dinershtein, pp. 563-564. 50 See Ibid., p. 563. 51 See V. Katanyan, Mayakovsky: Literaturnaya khronika, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1961), p. 91. 52 There is a fascinating account of the Futurists' activities in the Poets' Cafe by Sergei Spassky, Mayakovsky i ego sputniki (Leningrad, 1940), pp. 91-144. 53 The proceedings of Proletkult's conferences appeared in Novaya zhizn, No. 154, October 15, 1917, No. 155, October, 17, 1917, No. 157, October 19, 1917, No. 158, October 20, 1917. At one of these conferences, Lunacharsky remarked that classical and romantic styles had already played out their roles in literary history. Nevertheless, he added, the proletariat still had to learn from them. 54 See Novaya zhizn, No. 193, December 5, 1917. After Mayakovsky read Brik's letter, he wrote to the Briks: "I read in 'New Life' Osip's letter, which breathes of nobility. I would like to have the same" (Mayakovsky, XIII, pp. 28-29). 55 Novaya zhizn, No. 209, December 24, 1917. 56 See his letters to the Briks in Mayakovsky, XIII, pp. 28-29. 57 O. Brik, "IMO—Iskusstvo molodykh," in Mayakovskomu (Leningrad, 1940), p. 94. See also Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost V. V. Mayakovskogo," in Kniga: Issledovaniya i materialy, XVII (Moscow, 1968), p. 158. 58 See Iz istorii stroitelstva sovetskoi kultury 1917-1918: Dokumenty i vospominaniya (Moscow, 1964), p. 27. 59 Gazeta futuristov, No. 1, March 15, 1918, also in Mayakovsky, XII, pp. 8—9. 60 Gazeta futuristov, also in Mayakovsky, I, p. 136. The poem's title is "Revolution: A Poet's Chronicle." The poem graphically demonstrates Mayakovsky's poetically "factual" and publicistic involvement before the Bolshevik revolution. 61 "Otchot o deyatelnosti Otdela Izobrazitelnykh Iskusstv," Vestnik narodnogo prosveshcheniya soyuza sevemoi oblasti, No. 6—8 (October—November 1918), p. 82. 62 In a letter to the Briks in December 1917, Mayakovsky asked about the Academy of Fine Arts. Apparently, a conference of the Union of Art Workers took place in the Academy, where Brik represented the "left" artists. Mayakovsky and Brik wanted to "gain a foothold" in the Academy, on the assumption that Lunacharsky would use the Academy as a basis for organizing the art life of the country. At a meeting while Mayakovsky was present, it was suggested that Mayakovsky could become a member of the Academy's organizational commission. One Academy member arose to object: "Mayakovsky will enter the Academy only over my dead body. And if he does so, I will shoot him." See "Pisma Mayakovskogo . . . , " p. 104. 63 See the decree in Iz istorii stroitelstva..., pp. 26—27. The decree also nationalized the Academy's financial and property holdings. 64 A. Ermakov, "A. V. Lunacharsky i politika v oblasti iskusstva 1917 —1925 gg.," in Obogashchenie metoda sotsialisticheskogo realizma (Moscow, 1964), p. 343.

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65 Ibid. 66 Figaro, April 15, 1918. 67 A. Lunachaisky, Lenin o kulture i iskusstve (Moscow-Leningrad, 1938), pp. 123 —125. Lenin was perhaps alluding to this passage in Campanella's work: "It is knowledge who has caused all the walls... to be covered with paintings representing all the sciences. . . . And how cleverly are these beautiful pictures described in the verses which accompany them." Quoted in M. L. Berneri, Journey Through Utopia (London, 1950), pp. 96-97. 68 See the decree in Iz istorii stroitelstva..., pp. 25-26. 69 Ibid., p. 27. 70 A. Lunacharsky, "Ob Otdele izobrazitelnykh iskusstv," Novyi mir, No. 9, 1966, p. 237. 71 Ibid., p. 238. 72 See the decree in Iz istorii stroitelstva.. ., pp. 37 — 38. By July 30,1918 the Section had drawn up a list of monuments to revolutionary and cultural figures and the names of the artists who were to erect them {Ibid., pp. 38 — 44). But the delay in erecting the monuments displeased Lenin, who on September 19, 1918 sent the following telegram to Lunacharsky: "Today I heard a r e p o r t . . . on the busts and monuments. I am deeply angered; nothing has been done for months. Up to now there is not a single b u s t . . . There is no bust of Marx for the street; nothing has been done for propaganda purposes with inscriptions on the streets. I am announcing a reprimand for the criminal and negligent attitude; I demand that you send me the names of all those responsible so as to bring them to trial. Shame to the saboteurs and scatter-brains" (Ibid., p. 45). 73 See Brik, " I M O . . . , " p. 101, and Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost Mayakovskogo," pp. 158 — 159. 74 Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost Mayakovskogo," p. 158. 75 Brik, "IMO . ..," p. 100. 76 See Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost Mayakovskogo," p. 160. 77 Brik, "IMO . ..," p. 103. 78 Ibid., p. 106. 79 See Rzhanoe slovo. Revolyutsionnaya khrestomatiya futuristov (Petrograd, 1918), p.l. 80 Ibid., p. 2. 81 See Brik, "IMO . . .," pp. 103-104, and Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost Mayakovskogo," p. 162. 82 Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost Mayakovskogo," p. 162. 83 Ibid., p. 163. 84 See N. Plyashev, "Iz istorii Gosizdata," Druzhba narodov, No. 5, 1969, pp. 284-285. 85 Izvestiya, April 10, 1919. 86 Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost Mayakovskogo," p. 163. 87 Ibid. 88 V. Polyansky, "God proletarskoi literatury," Proletarskaya literatura, No. 5 (November 1918), p. 3. 89 Quoted in V. Katanyan, "K istorii Kom-futa," (unpublished), pp. 3—4. 90 Ibid., p. 4, 7. 91 Mayakovsky, I. p. 25. 92 Katanyan, "K istorii Kom-futa," p. 5. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., p. 6. 95 Ibid., p. 7. 96 Pravda, December 1, 1920.

NOTES

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97 Katanyan, "K istorii Kom-futa," pp. 15 — 16. 98 Ibid. This description of Kom-Fut's program was basically similar to that of Inkhuk. The organization, program and orientation of Inkhuk will be discussed in the following chapter. 99 See E. Naumov, "Lenin o Mayakovskom," in Literatumoe nasledstvo, LXV, pp. 209-210. 100 At a plenary session of the Central Inspection Commission on July 16,1920, it was reported that Central Press had consistently ignored the Commission's control by distributing books independently. The Commission considered this activity "exceptional" and urged "an immediate explanation" from Central Press, of which Malkin was head. The Commission also asked that Central Press inform it of "every new book" for subsequent distribution. Central State Archive of the October Revolution, Fund No. 395, 1/7, Report No. 5. 101 Naumov, p. 210. 102 Ibid., pp. 210, 212-213. 103 Malkin returned from the Urals to Moscow in September 1923 and renewed his ties with the Futurists. See Mayakovsky's letter to Lily Brik in "Pisma k L. Iu. Brik," p. 134. 104 Mayakovsky, XIII, pp. 4 9 - 5 0 .

Chapter Two 1 Shortly after the revolution, Lenin wrote this appeal, "To the Population:" "Comrade workers! Remember that you yourselves now administer the state. Nobody will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take all the affairs of the state into your own hands." Quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923,1 (London, 1951), p. 244. (original italics). 2 A. Lunacharsky, "K voprosu o natsionalizatsii teatrov," Vestnik teatra, No. 18, 1919, p. 3. 3 Quoted in Carr, p. 245. 4 Ibid. 5 See John Bowlt, "The Failed Utopia: Russian Art 1917-1932," Art in America, July-August 1971, p. 42. 6 The Russian Symbolist poet Valéry Bryusov remarked in 1920 that "Proletarian culture, in terms of its premises and tasks, must be a radical reorganization of the whole cultural structure of the art of the previous centuries." "Proletarskaya poeziya," Khudozhestvennaya zhizn, No. 1, 1920. (original italics). 7 See "Gosudarstvennye trudovye khudozhestvennye kommuny," Iskusstvo, January 15, 1919. (original italics). Stanley Mitchell defines Marx's view of art: "Art as an ideal realm or the realm of a privileged few ceases to exist in a communist society. But artistic activity flourishes on a new communal basis as the self-enjoyment of labor." "Lukacs Back to Front," Times Literary Supplement, May 21,1976, p. 624. (original italics). 8 Marx once noted that the division of labor had led to "the exclusive concentration of artistic talent in certain individuals and its consequent suppression in the broad masses." K. Marx i F. Engels ob iskusstve, I (Moscow, 1967), p. 230. Alvin Toffler recently expressed the hope that in the "superindustrial civilization of tomorrow, with its vast, silent cybernetic intricacies and its liberating quantities of time for the individual, art will not be a fringe benefit for the few, but an indispensable part of life for the many. It will move from the edge to the nucleus of national life." The Culture Consumers: A Study of Art and Affluence in America (New York, 1964), p. 68.

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9 See for example, M. Sabashnikov, "Zadachi Otdela izobrazitelnykh iskusstv Proletkulta," Gorn, No. 1,1919, pp. 6 7 - 6 9 : "Vozzvanie," Ibid., No. 2 - 3 , 1919, p. 91; B. Ivanov, "Rabochy i izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo," Ibid., pp. 92-93; "Khronika Proletkulta," Proletarskaya kultura, No. 4, 1918, p. 32. 10 O. Brik, "Drenazh iskusstva," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 1, 1918. 11 O. Brik, "Utselevshy bog," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 3, 1918. 12 Ibid. 13 O. Brik, "Dovolno soglashatelstva," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 6, 1919. 14 O. Brik, "Khudozhnik-proletary," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 2, 1918. 15 O. Brik, "Iskusstvo i kommuna," Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo, No. 1,1918, p. 25. Marx maintained that "In a communist society there are no painters but only men who paint as one of the forms of their activity" (K. Marx i F. Engels..I. p. 230). 16 Brik's idea was echoed by Théophile Gautier during the 1848 revolution in France: "We should like to see organized great camps and armies of painters, working at speed but immaculately, producing the vast works which will decorate the buildings of the Republic—the buildings we dream of, designed for the gigantic life of the future. Alongside these armies even the great schools of Italy with their host of pupils, would seem like private clubs. No doubt individualism would suffer, and a few would lose their little originality, their mastery of details; but the great works of art are almost all collective. No one knows the names of those who built and chiselled the cathedrals; Raphael himself, despite his personal value, sums up a civilization and closes a cycle of painters whose very existence blends into his." Quoted in T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artist and Politics in France 1848-1851 (London, 1973), p. 31. 17 See "Gosudarstvennye trudovye khudozhestvennye kommuny." 18 Ibid. 19 O. Brik, "Nash dolg," Khudozhestvennaya zhizn, No. 1, 1919. 20 Ibid. The Section of Fine Arts published the pedagogical principles for the artistic workshops in Spravochnik Otdela IZO Narkomprosa (Moscow, 1920). 21 At a conference of young artists in May 1918, it was resolved that art schools should be free and that each student should be free to select his own art instructor: " . . . art and artists must be absolutely free in every manifestation of their creative work." See "Rezoliutsiya konferentsii uchashchiksya iskusstvu." Anarkhiya, May 12, 1918. 22 In 1919, the Section of Fine Arts held exhibitions in Moscow, Petrograd and the provinces of the art works of the students in the free workshops. 23 O. Brik, "V poryadke dnya," in Iskusstvo v proizvodstve, I (Moscow, 1921), p. 8, and Obzor deyatelnosti Otdela izobrazitelnykh iskusstv (Peterburg, 1920), pp. 26 — 28. "The idea of the penetration of artistic labor into industry arose as a universal theory and spread to the whole culture of society without exception. Its very emergence was a reaction to the lack of harmony in the world of material and spiritual culture of society, to the immense chaos and nature of forms which the new Soviet society inherited from the old bourgeois world." L. Zhadova, "O teorii sovetskogo dizaina 20-kh godov," Voprosy tekhnicheskoi estetiki, No. 1, 1968, p. 91. 24 In July and August 1919, the Section also held an exhibition of the articles of the industrial workshops in Moscow, Petrograd, and an exhibition was also sent to the provinces. There is an informative discussion of these workshops in Konstantin Umanskij, Neue Kunst in Russland (Munich, 1920), pp. 49—51. Umanskij was a close observer of the art scene during the revolutionary years. Of the exhibition in Moscow, Umanskij writes that it "was an effective demonstration of the deep understanding of the young artists of the actual problems of the new art industry" (p. 49).

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25 Brik, "V poryadke dnya," p. 8. 26 "Khudozhestvennaya promyshlennost," Khudozhestvennaya zhizn, No. 1, 1919. It has been established authoritatively that Brik wrote this article. Brik's view was also shared by Sergei Tretyakov: "The democratization of art, in the form that it is conducted, has perhaps one positive feature: to serve educational aims, to acquaint the masses with the esthetic manifestations of preceding generations. Genuine art, however, does not at all consist in transforming people into spectators, but on the contrary, it consists in the assimilation by the masses of those qualities and of that skill in constructing and organizing raw material, a skill which was especially characteristic of specialists in art. This is the first condition. Second, genuine art consists in involving all the masses in that process of 'creating,' which to the present time has been the 'holy activity' of solitary people." "Iskusstvo v revolyutsii i revolyutsiya v iskusstve," Gom, No. 8, 1923, p. 117. 27 O. Brik, "APS," Zrelishcha, No. 61, 1923, p. 4. 28 According to V. Denisov, "the failure of the workshops was in their very principle of operation, in the basic approach to the organization of artistic education, in assuming that individual means could solve a problem that could only be solved by the collective efforts of a whole generation" ("O khudozhestvennoi shkole." Zhizn iskusstva, No. 818, November 1921). Denisov concluded, however, that the free workshops "Were a positive rather than a negative phenomenon in our artistic life." 29 Bowlt, "The Failed Utopia . . p . 48. 30 Programma Instituta khudozhestvennoi kultury (Moscow, 1920), unpaginated reproduction. Kandinsky's theoretical program had its sources in two previous publications, Über das Geistige in ¿1er Kunst (Munich, 1921) and Tekst khudozhnika (Moscow, 1918). For Kandinsky, art was a means of evoking spiritual feelings in man through combinations of forms and colors; and once the viewer was able to draw spiritual meaning from "abstract art," he would then be able "to experience the spiritual essence of absolute things" {Tekst khudozhnika, p. 53). More than this, Kandinsky saw art as the embodiment of the future construction of the world, of life itself, through geometrical and spatial forms. 31 See their introductions to the art catalogue, Desyataya gosudarstvennaya vystavka. Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm (Moscow, 1919). This book is one of the twelve published catalogues of the art exhibits which were held under the auspices of the Section of Fine Arts. There were many other art exhibits for which there were no catalogues primarily because of the large number of exhibited works. 32 See Meyerhold's article, "Aktyor budushchego i biomekhanika" in V. E. Meyerhold, Stari, pisma, rechi, besedy 1917-1939(Moscow, 1968), pp. 486-489, also translated into English in Edward Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre (New York, 1969), pp. 197-200. 33 See V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchonykh, Slovo kak takovoe (Moscow, 1913) and A. Kruchonykh, Deklaratsiya slova kak takovogo (Peterburg, 1913). Malevich often provided illustrations for Kruchonykh's poetry and publications, including the first title above, and also worked with Kruchonykh on his libretto, Pobeda nad solntsem. Malevich also wrote a short essay for Kruchonykh's Tainye poroki akademikov (Moscow, 1916), which can also be found in English translation in T. Andersen, ed., K. S. Malevich 1915-1933 (New York, 1971), pp. 1 7 - 1 9 . Malevich's essay on Suprematism is found on pages 120—122 (see footnote 29). For an excellent study of "trans-rational language," see Vladimir F. Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkely, 1968), pp. 127-132 ff. 34 There is a fine study of this subject by Agnes Sola, "Abstraction Picturale et Formalisme Russe," Revue de Littérature Comparée, January—March 1975, pp. 2 8 - 5 9 .

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35 John Bowlt, "Malevich's Journey into the Non-Objective World," Art News, December 1973, pp. 2 2 - 2 3 . 36 Bowlt, "The Failed Utopia...," p. 48. See also his "The Virtues of Soviet Realism," Art in America," November-December 1972, p. 100. 37 Quoted in David Sylvester, "Kasimir Malevich," Encounter, May 1960, p. 52. 38 A. Exter, "Prostota i praktichnost v odezhde," Krasnaya niva, No. 21,1923, p. 31. 39 S. Sarabyanov, Aleksei V. Babichev: Khudozhnik, teoretik, pedagog (Moscow, 1974), p. 83. 40 See the program in Sarabyanov, p. 102. Babichev expressed his personal artistic credo in 1921 which indicates a relationship with Kandinsky's views: "By organizing things and ideas, art organizes the consciousness and the psyche of the masses when it becomes a property of social life. Hence it is clear that its social significance is a way of reacting (vozdeistvie) on the masses" (Ibid., p. 103). 41 See A. Pavlyuchenkov, "V. I. Lenin i voprosy izobrazitelnogo iskusstva,' in Obogashchenie metoda sotsialisticheskogo realizma (Moscow, 1964), p. 287, and L. Khlebnikov, "Borba realistov i futuristov vo VKHUTEMASe,' in "Lenin i Lunacharsky,' Literatumoe nasledstvo, LXXX (Moscow, 1971), p. 704. 42 On November 10, 1920 Lenin, in a letter to Lunacharsky concerning the reorganization of the Section of Fine Arts, wanted "a unified sector, with the appointment of Communist political commissars in all central and leading institutions of this sector." V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, LII (Moscow 1965), p. 22. (original italics). 43 See Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, II, p. 271, 299. John Bowlt is certainly justified in noting that "The reason for the rapid development of Russian Constructivism toward design and architecture was not necessarily because of the pressure of industrial and proletcult esthetics . . . In fact, traditionally Russian art had been heavily overlaid with an extrinsic purpose, whether narrative, moral or mystical.. ." ("Bulgaria Rehabilitates the Soviet Avant-Garde," Art in America, March-April 1974, p. 93). 44 Milka T. Bliznakov, "The Search for a Style: Modern Architecture in the U.S.S.R. 1917-1932,' Unpublished Columbia University Ph. D. Dissertation, 1971, p. 104. 45 L. Zhadova, "Vkhutemas—Vkhutein," (manuscript), p. 4. This article is a penetrating and informative study of the subject and was published in Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, No. 11, 1970, pp. 36-43. 46 Quoted in Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings (Cambridge, 1957), p. 157. 47 Quoted in Zhadova, "Vkhutemas - Vkutein," p. 4, 8-9. The Section of Fine Arts remarked in 1919 that "One should not encourage eclectism in the students by teaching them artistic styles as norms of art. Style should be treated exclusively as a historical fact. Each epoch advances its own complex of artistic f o r m s . . . " ("Iskusstvo v trudovoi shkole," Khudozhestvennaya zhizn, No. 12, 1919). 48 As far as can be established, the following artists and theorists were members of Inkhuk during various stages of its history: Natan Altman (1889-1950), Boris Arvatov (1896-1940), Aleksei Babichev (1887-1963), G. Borisov (1899-), Osip Brik (1888-1945), I. Chasnik (1902-1929), N. Chuzhak (1876-1939), B. Efimov (1900-), Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), A. Drevin, (1899-1938), Aleksandra Exter (1882-1949), N. Dokuchaev (1891-1944), Pavel Filonov (1883-1941), Naum Gabo (1890-), Aleksei Gan (1893-1939), Vasily Kandinsky (1886-1944), V. Khrakovsky (1893-), Ivan Klyun (1870-1942), G. Klyutsis (1895-1944), B. Korolyov (1884-1963), V. Krinsky (1890-1971), I. Ilin (1880-1942), V. Ioganoson, Boris Kushner (1888-1937), Nikolai Ladovsky (1881-1941), A. Lavinsky (1893-1968), El Lissitzky (1890-1941), Kaziimr Malevich (1878-1935), F. Malevin (1890-1974), Pavel Mansurov (1896-), Mikhail Matyushin (1861-1942),

NOTES

49

50

51

52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62

141

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Konstantin Medunetsky (1899), K. Melnikov (1890-1974), Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1942), Anton Pevzner (1886-1962), Lyubov Popova (1889-1924), Nikolai Punin (1883-1953), Alesksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), E. Semyonova (1898-), David Shterenberg (1881-1948), G. Stenberg (1889-), V. Stenberg (1900-1953), V. Stepanova (1883-1958), N. Suetin (1897-1953), Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), N. Tarabukin (1899-1956), A. Toporkov (1896-), Sergei Tretyakov (1892-1939), Nadezhda Udaltsova (1885-1961), Aleksandr Vesnin (1880-1950), Viktor Vesnin (1882-1950). The manifesto is contained in S. Bojko, "Spatial Experiments: The Stenberg Brothers," in Von der Fläche zum Raum: Rußland 1916-1924 [From Surface to Space: Russia 1916-1924] (Cologne, 1974), p. 24. This book is in both German and English. Aleksei Gan, Konstruktivizm (Tver, 1922), p. 64. Shterenberg remarked in 1919: "Considering that our cities must be esthetically beautiful, the Section is taking a number of measures to come to the aid of urban construction, to develop it systematically and to deliver it from the chaos in which it now finds itself. Everyone knows that our homes look like boxes or graves . . . The Section is thus striving to create an artistically constructive apparatus which will take up the task of rebuilding our cities, to transform the squares and markets, to change the form of streets, etc." "Raskreposhchenie iskusstva," Vestnik zhizni, No. 3-4, 1919, p. 108. "The idea of productive art was advanced under the influence of the workers' movement. At the present time this idea has assumed epidemic proportions. Everbody has taken up the idea" (B. Arvatov, "V ubornoi," Zrelishcha, No. 7, 1922, p. 14). "The art of the preceding epoch was directed against life. Now we have lost the taste for art, for we have acquired a taste for life, for vital activity, for revolution. Art as an esthetic value above and beyond life, as devotion to some abstract 'beauty,' is becoming an overt piece of charlatanism. Only work that is directly related to the life-building of our epoch has the right to exist at the present time. Expediency is the criterion of every artistic work." V. Mass, "De-estetizatsiya iskusstva," Zrelishcha, No. 5, 1922, p. 7. O. Brik, "Razval Vkhutemasa," Lef, No. 1, 1923, p. 108. V. Pertsov, "Na styke iskusstva s proizvodstvom," Vestnik zhizni, No. 5, 1922, p. 23. O. Brik, "Se chelovek," Ogonyok, No. 19, 1923, p. 11. John Bowlt, "The Construction of Space," in Von der Fläche zum Raum. . ., p. 10-11. E. Semenova, "Vkhutemas, Lef, Mayakovsky," in Trudy po russkoi i slavyanskoi filologii," No. 9 (Tartu, 1966), p. 299. Quoted in "Pavel Mansurov," in Von der Fälche zum Raum.. ., p. 108. See S. Bojko, New Graphic Design in Revolutionary Russia (New York, 1972), pp. 9-38, and Zhadova, "Vkhutemas-Vkhutein," pp. 19-20. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922 (New York, 1970), pp. 257-258, and Bojko, New Graphic Design .. ., p. 20. Bojko, New Graphic Design..., p. 20. In another context, Bojko remarks that "Constructivism, with its philosophical rationalism, its conception of art completely merged with life, its readiness to collaborate with emergent industrialization—Constructvism arising as it did from a culturally underdeveloped country was more an intellectual movement, a school of analytical thinking than just a passing trend" ("Spatial Experiments: The Stenberg Brothers," p. 30). In his manifesto, Gan often spoke of Constructivism as a "form of intellectual-material production" (Konstruktivizm, p. 49, 53). According to Eugene Lampert, "Aesthetic nihilism is a characteristically Russian

142

63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

NOTES

attitude.... The experience sprang from an acutely felt conflict... between culture and life." Sons Against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution (London, 1965), p. 330. Quoted in Bojko, New Graphic Design . . ., p. 19. O. Brik, "V chom krizis," Ezhenedelnik Tsentralnogo doma rabotnikov prosveshcheniya i iskusstv, No. 1, 1922, pp. 9-10. O. Brik, "Shkola konstruktivizma," Ogonyok, No. 20, 1923, p. 6. I use the term Realists here for convenience, although there were actually two groups within Vkhutemas who opposed the Constructivists: "The advocates of pure art, the 'chistoviki,' from the Cezannists to the Suprematists, questioned the expediency of service rendered by art to practical public demand. The 'applicants,' 'prikladniki,' tended towards restoring the rank of artistic crafts and decorative art. They were convinced that the way to a new culture was through the simple dissemination of aesthetic activity." S. Bojko, "Vkhutemas," in Die 20-er Jahre in Osteuropa [The 1920's in Eastern Europe] (Cologne, 1975), pp. 20-21. This book is in both German and English. Quoted in W. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky (New York, 1970), p. 266. L. Khlebnikov, "Borba realistov i futuristov . . . , " p. 706. Ibid., p. 715. Ibid., p. 716. Ibid., p. 718. "Perepiska Lenina i Lunacharskogo," in "Lenin i Lunacharsky," Literatumoe nasledstvo, LXXX (Moscow, 1971), p. 292. Khlebnikov, "Borba realistov i futuristov . . . , " pp. 718-719. Ibid., p. 719. Brik, "Razval Vkhutemasa," pp. 27-28. In Brik's letter of December 14, 1921. "Institut khudozhestvennoi kultury," Russkoe iskusstvo, No. 2-3, 1923, p. 86. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 86, 88. This list is drawn from the following sources: Ibid., p. 88, Sarabyanov, p. 84, and T. Strizhenova, Iz istorii russkogo sovetskogo kostyuma (Moscow, 1972), p. 97. According to Boris Thomson, Lef "came closest of all Soviet artistic groups to establishing a valid and consistent Marxist esthetic." The Premature Revolution: Russian Literature and Society 1917-1946 (London, 1972), p. 96. For some studies of Lef, see Ibid., pp. 95-100, Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, 1973), pp. 209-218, and Vahan D. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930: A Study in Avant-Gardism (The Hague, 1974), pp. 126-134. See Von der Fläche zum Raum.. ., pp. 72-74. Sarabyanov, p. 84. See L. Zhadova, "O teorii sovetskogo dizaina 20-kh godov," pp. 103-107 for a discussion of Inkhuk's impact on the arts. Ibid., p. 103. Brik commented in 1924: "Unfortunately, our industrial production is still far from ready to accept the influx of creative forces. It is still weak" ("Proz-rabota," Lef, No. 4, 1924, p. 59). Zhadova, "O teorii sovetskogo dizaina . ..," p. 100. "Pisma Mayakovskogo k L. Yu. Brik," in Novoe o Mayakovskom," Literatumoe nasledstvo, LXV (Moscow, 1958), p. 134. O. Brik, "Mayakovsky i literatumoe dvizhenie 1917-1930 gg.," in V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XIII (Moscow, 1937), pp. 419-420.

NOTES

143

Chapter Three 1 "Gorky i sovetskie pisateli: Neizdannaya perepiska," in Literatumoe nasledstvo, LXX (Moscow, 1963), p. 87. 2 O. Brik, "Ot kartiny k sittsu," Lef, No. 6, 1924, pp. 31-34. 3 O. Brik, "Fotomontazh," Zarya Vostoka, September 21, 1924. See also his "Foto-kadr protov kartiny," Sovetskoe foto, No. 26, 1926, pp. 40-42. 4 O. Brik, "Protiv kino-dramy," Kino, October 27,1925. See also his "Chelovek byot cheloveka," Ibid., September 22, 1925; "Nastezh-li," Ibid., November 24, 1925; "Net i neizvestno," Ibid., April 26, 1926; "Kommerchesky raschot," Ibid., August 26, 1926; "Pol-pobedy," Ibid., April 12, 1927; "Kino i kinoshki," Sovetsky ekran. No. 27, 1926, p. 23; "Protivokinoyadie," Novyi Lef, No. 2, 1927, pp. 27-30. 5 O. Brik, "Ostayus veren!," Kino-gazeta, No. 45, 1927. 6 O. Brik, "Esteticheskaya ugolovshchina;" Ermitazh, No. 7, 1922, p. 9. 7 For this aspect of Mayakovsky's poetry, see the excellent discussion by Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, 1973), pp. 261-264. Brown remarks that Mayakovsky's commercial poetry "is usually deftly pointed, and of course immeasurably superior to any commercial verse written since, in the east or in the west" (p. 264). 8 O. Brik, "Reklama stikhom," Zhumalist, No. 12,1924, pp. 51-52. The translation of Lenin's remark on Mayakovsky's poem is made from Brik's article (p. 52). 9 See Robert A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920's (Princeton, 1968), which is the best study of this journal. 10 E. Dinershtein, "Mayakovsky v 'Kruge' i 'Krasnoi novi'," in Mayakovsky i sovetskaya literatura (Moscow, 1964), p. 407. 11 For additional information on the Octobrists, see Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature 1928-1932 (New York, 1953), Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories 1917-1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism (Berkeley, 1963), and Victor Terras, Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison, 1974), pp. 277-281. 12 Boris Thomson, The Premature Revolution: Russian Literature and Society 1917-1946 (London, 1972), p. 95. 13 A. Fevralsky, Vstrechi s Ma.yakovsk.im (Moscow, 1971), p. 52. 14 O. Brik, "Tak nazyvaemy formalny metod," Lef, No. 1, 1923, p. 215. 15 O. Brik, "Nepoputchitsa," Lef, No. 1, 1923, pp. 109-142. There is an excellent translation of this work by Anya Kroth in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 12, 1975, pp. 81-113. 16 Brown, Mayakovsky . . p. 214. 17 In the Criminal Code of 1922, the practice of informing was explicitly approved for crimes "known to have been committed or to be impending." Quoted in E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country 1924-1926, II (London, 1959), p. 239. At a Party conference in 1925, one delegate protested against this practice because it was "taking such forms and such a character that friend cannot tell a friend his sincere thought." Another delegate remarked that "If we suffer from anything, it is not from too much informing, but from too little" (Quoted in Carr, p. 239). 18 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1960), pp. 138-139. 19 Ibid., p. 134. 20 "A. V. Lunacharsky: Neizdannye materialy," in Literatumoe nasledstvo, LXXXII (Moscow, 1970), p. 239. 21 "Iz tvorcheskogo naslediya sovetskikh pisatelei," in Literatumoe nasledstvo, LXXIV (Moscow, 1965), pp. 32-33. 22 See the excellent and exhaustive analysis of this poem by Brown, Mayakovsky .. ., pp. 219-260.

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23 "Protokol pervogo soveshchaniya rabotnikov Lefa," (unpublished). There is an account of this conference by V. Bliumenfeld, "Na levom fronte," Zhizn iskusstva, No. 23, 1925, pp. 4-5. 24 'Protokol pervogo soveshchaniya . . . " See also V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochirtertii, XII (Moscow, 1961), p. 275. 25 "Protokol pervogo soveshchaniya . . ." 26 Mayakovsky, XIII, p. 61. 27 See E. Dinershtein, "Izdatelskaya deyatelnost V. V. Mayakovskogo," in Kniga: Issledovaniya i materialy, XVII (Moscow, 1968), pp. 178-179. 28 O. Brik, "Mayakovsky i literaturnoe dvizhenie 1917-1930 gg.," in V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XII (Moscow, 1937), p. 424. 29 Nikolai Punin, "Dnevniki 1924-1925," (unpublished; entry for March 13, 1925). Punin's diaries are located at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. According to Punin's diary entry for March 1, 1925, Brik was a member of the political "opposition," i. e. a supporter of Trotsky in the political struggle against Stalin. Punin adds, however, that Brik had abandoned his support ("ne vyderzahl"). If this is true —and there is no evidence to the contrary—Brik was perhaps forced to turn only to Trotsky for support; but in view of his own extremely tenuous political position at the time, Trotsky could not have taken up Brik's appeal for help. 30 "O politike partii v oblasti khudoszhestvennoi literatury," Pravda, July 1, 1925. 31 "Chto govoryat pisateli o postanovlenii TSK RKP(b)," Zhurnalist, No. 8-9, 1925, p. 33. 32 See Ermolaev, pp. 59-61, 113-114. 33 O. Brik, "Bryusov protiv Lenina," Na literatumom postu, No. 5-6, 1926, pp. 28-30. 34 Stefan Morawski, a leading authority on Marxist esthetics, describes its major historical assumptions: "These are the stress upon human labor which qualifies the foundation of all culture; the insistence upon the epochs of social revolution as essential to the progress of the species; and finally the view that communism is, for man, at once an ideal he sets for himself and the real, historical movement of his progress. It is in the light of these views that the work processes are regarded at once as the original locus of aesthetic activity and as a given from which aesthetic culture can never become wholly detached, that the arts are regarded as a conductor of the attitudes towards radical social change, and finally, that the ineradicable idea of art as the legislator and liberator of mankind is regarded now as directly related to the communist ideal movement." "The Aesthetic Theories of Marx and Engels." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, (Spring 1970), p. 304. 35 O. Brik, "Presdislovie," in B. Aivatov, Sotsiologicheskayapoetika (Moscow, 1926), pp. 7-12. 36 O. Brik, "Pochemu ponravilsya 'Tsement' Gladkova," Na literatumom postu, No. 2, 1926, pp. 30-32. 37 A. Fadeev, Stolbovaya doroga proletarskoi literatury (Leningrad, 1929), p. 41. 38 O. Brik, "Razgrom Fadeeva," NovyiLef, No. 5, 1928, pp. 1-15. Vladimir Trenin, a young and promising Futurist critic, noted two-hundred stylistic analogies between Fadeev's work and Chekhov's works. He also observed: " . . . the fetishism of the classical form is deeply mistaken, because form is of value to us not for its specific gravity in the old literature, but for its social function. At various times and under various conditions, one and the same form will fulfill different, at times diametrically opposed, functions." "Intelligentnye partizany," in Literatura fakta. Pervy sbomik materialov rabotnikov Lefa, N. Chuzhak, ed. (Moscow, 1929), p. 94. 39 O. Brik, "Blizhe k faktu," Novy Lef, No. 2, 1927, pp. 33-34. 40 O. Brik, "Fiksatsiya fakta, Ibid., No. 11, 1927, p. 50.

NOTES

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67

145

O. Brik, "Razlozhenie siuzheta," in Literatura fakta.. ., p. 221. O. Brik, "Blizhe k faktu," p. 32. O. Brik, "Uchit pisatelei," Novy Lef, No. 10, 1927, p. 37. Ibid., p. 34, and "Razlozhenie siuzheta", p. 220. O. Brik, "Za politiku," Novy Lef, No. 1, 1927, p. 22. "Razlozhenie siuzheta'" p. 219. R. D. B. Thomson, Review of Literatura fakta.. ., in The Slavonic and East European Review, (January 1975), p. 115. Thomson observes that the "contributors to this book faced the difficulties with a consistency and clearheadedness that remain unique among Marxists to this day. It is to be hoped that the reissue of this important collection will reawaken interest in Lef and put an end to the sloppy thought that still passes for Marxist aesthetics" (p. 114). O. Brik, "Za politiku," p. 19, 22-23. See Literaturnaya entsiklopediya, VI (Moscow, 1932), pp. 349-350, Brown, The Proletarian Episode. .., p. 159, and Gleb Struve, Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin (Norman, 1971), pp. 232-233. "Novogodnoe nastuplenie napostovtsev," Zhizn iskusstva, No. 1, 1929, p. 15. Brik remarked in 1927: "If Voronsky and Polonsky [editor of both New Worldand Press and Revolution] had given less attention to the cult of creative personalities, had expressed a little less enthusiasm about the artistic beauties of writers, and had pointed out a little more to them the necessity of turning to other forms of literary work, then our Soviet literature would have had many more interesting and necessary literary works" ("Protiv tvorcheskoi lichnosti" Novy Lef; No. 2, 1928 p. 13). "Literatura v 'tolstom' zhumale," Zhizn iskusstva, No. 2, 1929, p. 5. See Mayakovsky's comments in a discussion of the "social commission" in Chitatel i pisatel, January 7, 1928. See. V. Polonsky, "Kriticheskie zametki: khudozhnik i klassy (o teorii sotsialnogo zakaza)," Novy Mir, (September 1927), pp. 169-176. V. Polonsky, "Spor o sotsialnom zakaze," Pechat i revoliutsiya, (January-February 1929), pp. 22-25. Pages 19-75 of this issue were devoted to a discussion of the "social commission" by critics and writers. Henri Arvon, Marxist Aesthetics (Ithaca, 1973), p. 12. O. Brik, "Ne teoriya, a lozung," Pechat i revolyutsiya, (January-February 1929), pp. 19-24. See V. Katanyan, Mayakovsky. Literaturnaya khronika, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1961), pp. 370-373, 376, 381, 383. Ibid., p. 383. Ibid., p. 387. Ibid. L. Brik, "Vospominaniya," (unpublished), pp. 122-123. Mayakovsky, XIII,, p. 134. Brown, Mayakovsky.. ., p. 366. "Dva puti," Rezets, No. 6, 1930, p. 1. Although Mayakovsky was accepted into Rapp on February 6, 1930, his recantation was always expected, since his acceptance did not automatically make him a "proletarian" poet. In March 1930, another editorial in Rezets pointed out: "Only those who have decisively repudiated the burden of their former errors can enter the Association." "V nogu s tempami zhizni," Ibid., No. 9, 1930, p. 2. "Beseda s N. Tikhonovym," Ibid., No. 6, 1930, pp. 3-4. 'Stenogramma plenuma Refa," (unpublished). The conference was held on January 15,16, 17,1930. Mayakovsky spoke at the conference on January 15, and confined

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68 69

70 71 72

73

NOTES

his remarks largely to the theatre. He did comment, however, that Rapp was "the only ally." See Mayakovsky, XII, pp. 401-406. According to Brown, "Brik may have had a hand" in Mayakovsky's decision to join Rapp (Mayakovsky. . ., p. 365). Ibid., pp. 233-234. While this is somewhat true, the opposite is equally, if not more, true, since there is no evidence that Lily did not love Mayakovsky. That Lily married Mayakovsky and lived with him for some fifteen years indicates, by any human standard, a certain measure of "love." L. Brik, "Vospominaniya," p. 41. Mayakovsky, X, pp. 279-285. V. Polonskaya, "Vospominaniya o Mayakovskom" (unpublished). There are several excerpts from Polonskaya's impressionistic "notes" (zapiski) in V. Pertsov, Mayakovsky: Zhizn i tvorchestvo v poslednie gody 1925-1930 (Moscow, 1965), pp. 37-374. These "notes" were apparently the basis of her memoirs in essay form. Mayakovsky, XIII, p. 168. The reference to Ermilov, a Rapp official and literary critic, concerns his crude attack on Mayakovsky's play, "The Bathhouse" (Pravda, March 13, 1930). Mayakovsky responded by displaying a poster in the Meyerhold Theatre, where his play was held, but Rapp officials applied political pressure to remove the poster, which said: One cannot at once steam out a swarm of bureaucrats. There wouldn't be enough bathhouses or soap. But yet bureaucrats get help from the pen of critics, like Ermilov. (Mayakovsky, XI, p. 350)

Chapter Four 1 L. Brik, "Iz vospominanii" (unpublished), pp. 19-20. 2 In his penetrating formalist studies on poetry in 1928, Brik pointed out the role of Mayakovsky's poetic innovations in the evolution of Russian versification. See "Ritm i sintaksis," Novy Lef, Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6, pp. 15-20, 23-29, 32-37, 33-39 respectively. 3 See "Literaturny kommentary',, in V. V. Mayakovsky, Sochineniya, I (MoscowLeningrad, 1928), pp. 31-55. 4 O. Brik, "Poet proletarskoi revolyutsii," Pioner, No. 4, 1930, pp. 15-16. See also his "Kratkaya biografiya i obshchestvenno-literaturny put," Klubny repertuar, No. 5, 1930, pp. 28-31, in which Brik stressed the publicistic themes in Mayakovsky's poetry. 5 In 1933, Brik wrote an introduction to Mayakovsky's Rosta posters, "Mayakovsky —khudozhnik," in Vladimir Mayakovsky (Moscow, 1933), pp. 7-10. 6 O. Brik, "Poet V. V. Mayakovsky," in Shkolny Mayakovsky, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1931), pp. 91-102. 7 O. Brik, "Oktyabrskaya poema Mayakovskogo," 30 dnei, No. 10-11, pp. 79-84. 8 O. Brik, "Poet i teatr," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 14, 1933.

NOTES

147

9 O. Brik, "Kniga, kotoruyu nado napisat," Khudozhestvennaya literatura, No. 5, 1935, pp. 1-3. The article's title is significant. 10 Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories 1917-1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism (Berkeley, 1963), p. 119. 11 Ibid., p. 124. See also Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature 1928-1932 (New York, 1953), pp. 221-222. 12 O. Brik, "O poize tvorcheskikh obedinenii," Literatumy kritik, No. 5, 1934, pp. 155-160. It is rather surprising that Brik's article was published because one of the principal purposes of the new Union of Soviet Writers was to put an end to factional controversies. But its publication perhaps reveals that there was substantial support for Brik's views. 13 Nikolai Bukharin, "Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.," in Problems of Soviet Literature, H. G. Scott, ed. (London, 1935), p. 203, 207. 14 Ibid., p. 222. 15 Ibid., p. 257. 16 Ibid., pp. 232-235. 17 Ibid., p. 247. See also Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1973), p. 356. 18 According to Brown, Bukharin's "tribute to Pasternak as a superlative poetic craftsman" could only cause "alarm" for the Briks, and posed "a clear threat to the value of the legacy Lily had inherited" from Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution [Princeton, 1973], p. 359). That the Stalinist regime could have "elevated" Pasternak above Mayakovsky, in view of the political climate of the immediate period, was quite remote. 19 O. Brik, "V masterskoi V. V. Mayakovskogo," Smena, No. 3, 1935, p. 16. 20 O. Brik, "V. V. Mayakovsky," Krasnoarmeets i krasnoflotets, No. 7, 1935, p. 2. 21 L. Brik, "Vospominaniya o Mayakovskom," (unpublished, unpaginated). 22 Ibid. 23 See also Brown, Mayakovsky ..., p. 370. 24 O. Brik, "Poslushaite, tovarishchi potomki," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 14, 1938. 25 O. Brik, "Poet sovetskoi epokhi," Literatura v shkole, No. 2, 1936, p. 29. 26 O. Brik, "Narodny poet," in Urozhainy marsh (Moscow, 1936), p. 9. 27 O. Brik, "Blok i Mayakovsky," Literatumy Leningrad, No. 1, 1936. 28 Brik, "Poslushaite, tovarishchi potomki." 29 O. Brik, "O kritike stsenariya," Kino, May 17,1938. See also Brik's account of his work in "Iz teorii i praktiki stsenarista," in Kak my rabotaem nad kinostsenariem (Moscow, 1936), pp. 41-53. 30 E. Zhemchuzhnaya, "Vospominaniya o Brike," (unpublished, unpaginated). 31 For Brik's activities during the war see his "Kartina vyshla na ulitsu," Znamya, No. 12, 1944, pp. 187-191. 32 "Osip Maksimovich Brik," Tassovets, March 1, 1945. The obituary was submitted to Literatumaya gazeta, the newspaper for the Union of Writers, but its Editor, D. Polikarpov, refused to publish it.

Chapter Five 1 "Ot redaktsii," in "Novoe o Mayakovskom," Literatumoe nasledstvo, Vol. LXV (Moscow, 1958), p. 5. (italics added). 2 Ibid., p. 39, 59, 85, 103, 109, 138, 159, 165, 189, 229, 259. 3 "Protiv iskazheniya istoricheskoi pravdy," Literatumaya gazeta, April 16, 1959.

148

NOTES

4 See P. Neznamov, "Mayakovsky v 20-kh godakh," in V. V. Mayakovsky v vospominartiyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1963), p. 362-377, and N. Aseev, "Vospominaniya," Ibid., p. 413. 5 L. Brik, "Predlozhenie issledovatelyam," Voprosy literatury, No. 9, 1966, pp. 203-208. 6 V. Kozhinov, "Dostoevsky ili geroi Dostoevskogo?" Ibid., pp. 208-209. 7 Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, 1973), p. 346. 8 See Komsomolskaya pravda, April 9, 18, 1959. 9 A. Koloskov, Zhizn Mayakovskogo (Moscow, 1950), pp. 259-260. 10 A. Koloskov, Mayakovsky v borbe za kommunizm (Moscow, 1958), p. 1. 11 See Izvestiya Akademii nauk. Otdelenie literatury iyazyka, Vol. 17, No. 6 (November-December, 1958), p559, 561. 12 See V. V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, IX (Moscow, 1958), pp. 386-389 for the complete text. The other poem, "A Letter to Comrade Kostrov . . . " is on pp. 381-385 of the same volume. 13 Mayakovsky's letters to Tatyana Yakovleva were first published in Roman Jakobson, "Novye stroki Mayakovskogo," in Russky literatumy arkhiv (New York, 1956), pp. 173-206. 14 A. Vorontsov, A. Koloskov, "Lyubov poeta," Ogonyok, April 14, 1968, p. 13. 15 Ibid., p. 12. 16 Brown, p. 339. 17 Vorontsov, Koloskov, pp. 12-13. 18 Ibid., p. 13. 19 A. Koloskov, "Tragediya poeta," Ogonyok, June 1, 1968, p. 26. 20 A. Koloskov, "Tragediya poeta," Ibid., June 14, 1968, pp. 18-19. 21 Ibid., p. 22. 22 In the Soviet scholarly world, however, the attitude towards Brik is still somewhat positive. In 1968, one Soviet scholar called Brik "one of the best and most devoted friends of Mayakovsky. He often advised the poet on a broad range of problems concerning esthetics, philology, poetry and criticism. It is well known that not all of Brik's advice was to Mayakovsky's advantage..." A. Dymshits, "OMB," in his Zvenya pamyati (Moscow, 1968), p. 370. 23 See, for example, Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 12, 1975, No. 13, 1976; Vladimir Majakovskij, Lettere D'Amore A Lilja Brik (Milano, 1969); Lili Brik, Majakovskij Ur Minnen (Stockholm, 1974); Maria Enzensberger, "Osip Brik: Selected Writings," Screen, No 3. (Autumn 1974), pp. 35-58. Lily Brik gives her personal impressions of Mayakovsky's activities and behavior from the summer of 1929 to his suicide in "Poslednie mesiatsy," in Vladimir Majakovskij: Memoirs and Essays, Bengt Jangfeldt, Nils Ake Nilsson, eds. (Stockholm, 1975), pp. 11-24. This very interesting work, as well as Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917-1921 (Stockholm, 1976), Elizabeth Henderson, "Left Front: The October Revolution in the Poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky," (Yale University Doctoral Dissertation, 1975), and Haiina K. Stephan, "Lef and the Left Front of Arts," (University of Michigan Doctoral Dissertation, 1975), came to my attention as this book went to press.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BRIK'S WORKS

"KHLEBa," in Vzyal: Baraban futuristov (Peterburg, 1915), pp. 12-13. "Zvukovye povtory," in Poetika: Sbomikpo teorii poeticheskogo yazyka (Peterburg, 1916), pp. 24-62; also in Michigan Slavic Materials, 5 (1964), pp. 3-45. "Pismo v redaktsiyu 'Novaya zhizn'," Novaya zhizn, December 5, 1917. "Neumestnoe politikanstvo," Knizhny ugol, no. 2, 1918, pp. 28-29. "Drenazh iskusstvu," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 1, 1918. "Khudozhnik-proletary," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 2, 1918. „Letuchy teatr," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 3, 1919. "Utselevshy bog," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 6, 1919. "Dovolno soglashatelstva," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 9, 1919. "Est nad chom podumat," Iskusstvo kommuny, No. 10, 1919. "Khudozhnik i kommuna," Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo, No. 1, 1919. "Gosudarstvennye trudovye khudozhestvennye kommuny," Iskusstvo, January 15, 1919. "Lyogkost mysli," Iskusstvo, April 1, 1919. "Ne terpit otlagatelstva," Iskusstvo, July 8, 1919. "Nash dolg," Khudozhestvennaya zhizn, No. 1, 1919. "V. Bryusov: Nauka o stikhe," Proletarskaya kultura, No. 13-14, 1920, pp. "V poryadke dnya," in Iskusstvo v proizvodstve (Moscow, 1921), pp. 7-8. "Delo vsekh," Agit-Rosta, No. 16, 1921. "Sobrat prodnalog malo," Agit-Rosta, No. 18, 1921. "V chom krizis," Ezhenedelnik Tsentralnogo doma rabotnikov prosveshcheniya i iskusstv, No. 1, 1922, pp. 9-10. "'Izmy' i kult-rabota," Ezhenedelnik Tsentralnogo doma rabotnikov prosveshcheniya i iskusstv, No. 9-10, 1922, pp. 10-11.

150

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIRK'S WORKS

"O neprilichnom," Zrelishcha, No. 5, 1922, p. 10. "Agit-kholl," Emütazh, No. 4, 1922, pp. 5-6. "Esteticheskaya ugolovshchina," Ermitazh, No. 7, 1933, p. 9. "Iskusstvo obyavlyat," Zhurnalist, No. 6, 1923, pp. 26-28. "Se chelovek," Ogonyok, No. 19, 1923, pp. 11-12. "Shkola Konstruktivizma," Zarya Vostoka, August 12, 1923. "Balet 'Sketing-ring' Lezhe," Zrelishcha, No. 19, 1923, pp. 12-13. "Germanskie khudozhniki i teatr," Zrelishcha, No. 20, 1923, pp. 8-9. "K vsenarodnomu teatru," Zrelishcha, No. 21, 1923, pp. 10-11. "Ne tak prosto," Zrelishcha, No. 21, 1923, p. 11. "Sudba tantsa," Zrelishcha, No. 23, 1923, pp. 10-11. "Eto ne yubilei," Zrelishcha, No. 30, 1923, p. 11. "Iskusstvo zapada," Zrelishcha, No. 58, 1923, pp. 8-9. "APS," Zrelishcha, No. 61, 1923, p. 4. "Lyubov Popova," Zrelishcha, Nö. 89, 1923, p. 9. "Za chto boretsya Lef" Lef, No. 1, 1923, pp. 3-7. "V kogo vzgryzaetsya Lef" Lef, No. 1, 1923, pp. 8-9. "Nasha slovesnaya rabota," Lef, No. 1, 1923, pp. 4 0 ^ 1 . "V proizvodstvo!," Lef, No. 1, 1923, p. 108. "Nepoputchitsa," Lef, No. 1, 1923, pp. 109-142; also published separately (Moscow, 1925). "Tak nazyvaemy formalny metod," Lef, No. 1, 1923, pp. 213-215. "Usluzhlivy estet," Lef, No. 2, 1923, pp. 92-103. "Sosnovskomu," Lef, No. 3, 1923, p. 4. "Krit-khaltura," Lef, No. 4, 1924, pp. 22-26. "Razval Vkhutemasa," Lef, No. 4, 1924, pp. 27-28. "Proz-rabota," Lef, No. 4, 1924, p. 59. "Ne v teatre, a v klube," Lef, No. 5, 1924, p. 22. "Ot kartiny k sittsu," Lef, No. 6, 1924, pp. 27-34. "Fotomontazh," Zarya Vostoka, September 21, 1924. "Reklama stikhom," Zhurnalist, No. 12, 1924, pp. 51-52. "Na soveshchanii rabotnikov Lefa," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, No. 1,1925, pp. 93-95. "Chelovek byot cheloveka," Kino, September 22, 1925. "Fakt protiv anekdota," Vechernaya Moskva, October 14, 1925. "Protiv kino-dramy," Kino, October 27, 1925. "Nastezh-li?," Kino-gazeta, November 24, 1925. "Chto govoryat pisateli o postanovlenii TSK RKP(b)," Zhurnalist, No. 8-9, 1925, p. 33.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIRK'S WORKS

151

"Pochemu ponravilsya Tsement Gladkova," Na literaturnompostu, No. 2, 1926, pp. 30-32. "Bryusov protiv Lenina," Na literaturnom postu, No. 5-6, 1926, pp. 28-30. "Fotokadr protiv kartiny," Sovetskoe foto, No. 2, 1926, pp. 40-42. "Posledny krik," Sovetsky ekran, No. 7, 1926, pp. 3-4. "Pissi Puk," Sovetsky ekran, No. 17-18, 1926, p. 4. "Kino v teatre Meyerholda," Sovetsky ekran, No. 20, 1926, pp. 6-7. "Sto protsentov braka," Sovetsky ekran, No. 25, 1926, p. 3. "Kino i kinoshki," Sovetsky ekran, No. 27, 1926, p. 3. "Kartiny, kotorye nam ne pokazyvayut," Sovetskoe kino, No. 2, 1926, p. 9. "Foto i kino," Sovetskoe kino, No. 2, 1926, pp. 22-23. "Net i neizvestno," Kino, April 6, 1926. "Kommerchesky raschot," Kino, August 26, 1926. "Kakaya nam nuzhna reklama?," Zhurnalist, No. 10,1926, pp. 61-62. "Predislovie," in Boris Arvatov, Sotsiologicheskaya poetika (Moscow, 1926), pp. 7-12. "Za politiku," Novy Lef, No. 1, 1927, pp. 19-24. "Za novatorstvo," Novy Lef, No. 1, 1927, pp. 24-28. "Protivokinoyadie," Novy Lef, No. 2, 1927, pp. 27-30. "Blizhe k faktu," Novy Lef, No. 2, 1927, pp. 32-34. "Otvechat na statyu Polonskogo shchitayu nevozmozhnym," Novy Lef, No. 3, 1927, p. 46. "Ritm i sintaksis," Novy Lef, No, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1927, pp. 15-20, 23-29, 32-37, 33-39, respectively; also in Michigan Slavic Materials, 5 (1964), pp. 49-76. "Zapisnaya knizhka Lef a," Novy Lef, No. 5, 1927, pp. 4-5. "Dzhaz-band," Novy Lef, No. 6, 1927, pp. 10-12. "My-futuristy," Novy Lef, No. 8-9, 1927, pp. 49-52. "Provit romantiki," Novy Lef, No. 10, 1927, p. 1. "Uchit pisatelei," Novy Lef, No. 10, 1927, pp. 33-37. "My ishchem," Novy Lef, No. 11-12, 1927, pp. 1-2. "Fiksatsiya fakta," Novy Lef, No. 11-12, 1927, pp. 44-50. "Le/i kino," Novy Lef, No. 11-12, 1927, pp. 63-70. "Po sushchestvu stsenarnogo krizisa," Sovetskoe kino, No. 8-9, 1927, pp. 11-12. "Pisateli o tolstykh zhurnalakh," Na literaturnom. postu, No. 20-21, 1928, p. 90. "Pol-pobedy," Kino, April 5, 1927.

152

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIRK'S WORKS

"Pobeda fakta," Kino, April 12, 1927. "Protiv zhanrovykh kartin," Kino-gazeta, No. 27, 1927. "Ostayus veren," Kino-gazeta, No. 45, 1927. "Protiv tvorcheskoi lichnosti," Novy Lef, No. 2, 1928, pp. 12-14. "Za lyogky zhanr," Novy Lef, No. 2, 1928, pp. 34-39. "Ot kartiny k foto," Novy Lef, No. 3, 1928, pp. 29-33. "Ob '11-om' i 'Oktyabre'," Novy Lef, No. 4, 1928, pp. 27-33. "Razgrom Fadeeva," Novy Lef, No. 5, 1928, pp. 1-5. "Simulyatsiya nevmenyaemosti," Novy Lef, No. 7, 1928, pp. 1-3. "Kommentary k Mayakovskomu," in Mayakovsky: Sochineniya, I (Moscow, 1928), pp. 31-52. "Ne teoriya, a lozung," Pechat i revolyutsiya, No. 1,1929, pp. 25-31. "Poet V. V. Mayakovsky," in Shkolny Mayakovsky (Moscow, 1929), pp. 91-102. "Politika, literatura i kritika," Kniga i revolyutsiya, No. 12, 1929, pp. 48-49. "Poet proletarskoi revolyutsii," Pioner, No. 4, 1930, pp. 15-16. "Kratkaya biografiya i obshchestvenno-literaturny put Mayakovskogo," Klubny repertuar, No. 5, 1930, pp. 28-31. "Stsenarnye mytarstva: O rabote Mayakovskogo v kino," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 18, 1931. "Mayakovsky—detyam," Kniga molodezhi, No. 9, 1931, pp. 50-52. "Oktyabrskaya poema Mayakovskogo," 30 dnei, No. 10-11,1932, pp. 79-84. "Dve povesti Georgiya Shtorma," Literaturny kritik, No. 3, 1933, pp. 140-143. "O zanimatelnosti," Kino, April 4, 1933. "Poet i teatr," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 14, 1933. "Mayakovsky—khudozhnik," in Vladimir Mayakovsky (Moscow, 1933), pp. 7-10. "Lenin v stikhakh Mayakovskogo," Literaturny kritik, No. 4,1934, pp. 106-116.

"O poize tvorcheskikh obedineny," Literaturny kritik, No. 5,1934, pp. 155-160. "Komarinsky muzhik. Libretto opery," in Almanakh s Mayakovskim (Moscow, 1934), pp. 130-194. "O Mayakovskom," Budenovets, April 13, 1935. "O biografii poeta," Literaturny Leningrad, April 14, 1935. "Poet revolyutsionnoi oborony," Smena, April 14, 1935. "Vospominaya Mayakovskogo," Kurortnaya gazeta, April 14, 1935.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIRK'S WORKS

153

"V masterskoi stikha," Severo-kavkazky bolshevik, April 14, 1935. "V nogu s vremenem," Ekonomicheskaya zhizn, April 18, 1935. "V masterskoi V. Mayakovskogo," Smena, No. 3, 1935, p. 16. "Kniga, kotoruyu nado pisat," Khudozhestvennaya literatura, No. 5, 1935, pp. 1-3. "V. V. Mayakovsky," Krasnoarmeets i krasnoflotets, No. 7, 1935, pp. 2-3. "Blok i Mayakovsky," Literatumy Leningrad, No. 1, 1936. "Poet sovetskoi epokhi," Literature v shkole, No. 2, 1936, pp. 15-29. "Tema Mayakovskogo," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 11, 1936. "Mayakovsky o 'Fiskakh' i 'Apogeyakh'," Literatumy Leningrad, April 14, 1936. "Mayakovsky—redaktor i organizator," Literatumy kritik, No. 4, 1936, pp. 112-146; also as "Mayakovsky i literaturnoe dvizhenie 1917-1930," in V. V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XII (Moscow, 1937), pp. 405—432. "Ocherk stikhom," Nashi dostizheniya, No. 4, 1936, pp. 138-143. "O Mayakovskom," Ogonyok, No. 10, 1936, p. 1. "Iz teorii i praktiki stsenarista," in Kak my rabotaem nad kinostsenariem (Moscow, 1936), pp. 41-53. "Narodny poet," in Urozhainy marsh (Moscow, 1936), pp. 7-10. "Mayakovsky i Pushkin," Vechernaya Moskva, February 9, 1937. "Est li u Mayakovskogo 'tipy'," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 11, 1937. "Mayakovsky i tsarskaya politsiya," Stalinogorsky proletary, April 14, 1937. "Mayakovsky—lirik," Za kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie, April 14, 1937. "Pevets revolyutsii," Pionerskaya pravda, April 14, 1937. "Lyubimoe oruzhie," Kamensky rabochy, April 18, 1937. "Pevets revolyutsii," Za udamy tempy, April 18, 1937. "Poet revolyutsii," Vechernaya Moskva, October 20, 1937. "Poet-patriot," Kharkovsky rabochy, April 13, 1938. "Lyubov k rodine," Kommunar, April 14, 1938. "Ranny Mayakovsky," Severny kosomolets, April 14, 1938. "Slushaite, Tovarishchi potomki," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, April 14,1938. "Voina v stikhakh Mayakovskogo," Udmurtskaya pravda, April 14, 1938. "Poeziya V. V. Mayakovskogo," Prikamskaya kommuna, April 18, 1938. "O kritike stsenariev," Kino, May 17, 1938.

154

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIRK'S WORKS

"Nash poet," Dnovets, July 20, 1938; also in Leningradskayapravda, July 18, 1938. "Teatr publitsista," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, July 18, 1938. "Poet -boets," Stalinskaya pravda, July 20, 1938. "Mayakovsky na stsene," Dekada moskovskikh zrelishch, No. 11, 1938, p. 8. "Stikhi o rodine," in V. V. Mayakovsky (Moscow, 1938), pp. 1-6. "Vladimir Mayakovsky," in V. V. Mayakovsky: Stikhi, poemy, proza (Moscow-Leningrad, 1938), pp. 5-32. "Glazami poeta," Kino, April 12, 1940. "Mayakovsky i muzyka," Sovetskaya muzyka, No. 4,1940, pp. 51-59. "Mayakovsky—stsenarist," Iskusstvo kino, No. 4, 1940, pp. 8-9. "Poet—bolshevik," Sotsialisticheskoe zemledelie, April 14, 1940. Ivan Grozny. Libretto opery (Molotov, 1942). "Uchenie svet, a neuchenie tma," Iskusstvo kino, No. 10, 1940, pp. 57-58. "IMO—Iskusstvo molodykh," in Mayakovskomu (Leningrad, 1940), pp. 88-107. "Kartina vyshla na ulitsu," Znamya, No. 12, 1942, pp. 187-191. Works written jointly: With Mayakovsky: Radio-oktyabr (Moscow, 1926). "Moskva gorit," in V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XI (Moscow, 1936), pp. 239-265. With O. Leonidov: "Postavshchiki podsobnogo materiala," Zvezda, No. 7, 1940, pp. 158-163. Evgeny Bazarov (Moscow, 1934).

INDEX

Academy of Artistic Sciences, 71, 72. Academy of Arts, 26, 27, 28, 29, 49. Altman, N„ 15,17, 30, 31, 38, 40, 58,65, 66, 68, 70. Art of the Commune, 31, 35. Art of the Young (Imo), 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35. Arvatov, B., 69, 70, 85-88. Association of Artists of the Revolution, 67. Association of Socialist Art, 19, 24. Aseev, N., 32, 75, 82, 122. Averbakh, L„ 77-78, 128. Babichev, A., 57, 70, 72. Belinsky, V., 94. Benois, A., 15, 17, 18, 19. Blok, A., 11, 17, 121. Bogdanov, A., 15, 16. Bogdanov, S., 65, 66. Bolshevik regime, 17, 26, 63, 109. Bolshevik revolution, 17, 25, 29, 43, 45, 51, 55, 64, 91,95, 109,110,112. Borisov, G., 69. Bowlt, J., 62. Brik, Lily, marriage to Brik, 2; reaction to Mayakovsky's poetry, 3; marriage to Mayakovsky, 4; role in Mayakovsky's poetry, 4; describes her relationship with Brik and Mayakovsky, 5; tensions with Mayakovsky, 103-104; mentioned in Mayakovsky's suicide note, 106; concern for Mayakovsky's poetic legacy, 109-110; marriage to V. Primakov, 112; writes letter to Stalin about Mayakovsky, 118-119; efforts to recover her place in Mayakovsky's poetic legacy, 125-126; attacked by Soviet journalists, 39^t0, 127-128, 130.

Brik, Osip, early life and education, 1-2; marriage to Lily, 2; meeting with Mayakovsky, 2-3; military service, 5-6; work on Russian poets and poetics, 6-7; formation of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz), 8-9; pre-revolutionary activities and views, 10-41; connection with the Cheka, 33; post-revolutionary activities and views, 43-103; marriage to E. Zhemchuzhnaya, 104; political projection of Mayakovsky's poetic image, 109-113, 117-118, 120-122; views on the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, 114—115; death and funeral, 122-123; Soviet view of, 125, 132. Brown, E. J., 79, 100, 127, 130. Bukharin, N„ 44, 115-117. Burliuk, D., 4, 12, 20, 24, 32. Campanella, T., 27. Central Press (Tsentropechat), 31, 32, 39. Chagall, M., 31. Cheka (Russian secret police), 33, 79. Constructivism (Constructivists), 60-62, 64-65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 81. Dinershtein, A., 13, 35, 36, 126. Dostoevsky, F., 63, 127. Drevin, A., 71. Eikhenbaum, B., 7, 32. Eisenstein, S., 75, 122. Engels, F„ 20, 87, 94, 96. Ehrenburg, I., 122. Erlich, V., 8. Exter, A., 56, 70. Fadeev, A., 87, 89-91, 114, 115, 122.

156

INDEX

Fellow-Travellers, 77, 83, 114. Filonov, P., 31. First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), 114. Formalism (Formalists), 9,10, 31, 35,40, 54, 78, 80, 85,113,116,117,118,125, 126. Freedom for Art, 11. Futurism (Futurists), 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 20, 22, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 45, 46, 54, 58, 70, 76, 78-79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 113, 117, 125, 126. Futurists'Newspaper, 24.

Lebedev-Polyansky, P., 16, 23. Lef (The Left Front of Arts), 71, 79, 80, 81, 82, 113, 114. Lenin, V., 16, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 58, 67, 76, 80, 83, 84, 95, 96. Lermontov, M., 7. Lissitzky, El, 68, 69. "Literature of Fact," 91-93. Lukacs, G., 95. Lunacharsky, A., 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 65, 66, 67, 80.

Gabo, N„ 31, 59. Gan, A., 39, 61-63, 64, 81. Gladkov, F„ 73, 87-89. Gorky, M„ 10, 11, 12,13,14,15,18, 21, 28, 73. Gosizdat (State Publishing House), 34,35, 36, 40, 82, 98, 104, 107, 112, 118.

Malevich, K„ 30, 31, 54, 56, 66, 68. Malevin, F., 69. Malkin, B„ 17, 21, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 75, 118. Mansurov, P., 62. Marx, K„ 20, 43, 47, 85, 87, 94, 95. Marxism, 10, 63, 85, 86, 94. Mayakovskaya, L., 128. Mayakovsky, Vladimir, meeting and association with Briks, 2-5; marriage to Lily Brik, 4; military service, 5-6; prerevolutionary views and activities, 10-41; abandons Futurists, 98; organizes exhibit, "20 Years of Work," 99, 104-105; decision to join the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Rapp), 100; love affair with Veronika Polonskaya, 105-106; commits suicide, 106; suicide note, 106-107; love affair with Tatyana Yakovleva, 128-131. Medunetsky, K., 60. Meyerhold, V., 17, 39, 54.

Ilin, I., 69. Induk (Institute for Industrial Culture), 72. Inkkuk (Institute for Artistic Culture), 38, 51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 94. International Labor Relief-Russia (Mezhrabpom-Rus), 75. Jakobson, R., 7, 32. Kamensky, V., 20, 24, 31, 32. Kandinsky, V., 31, 51-58, 60. Kemeny, A., 69. Kerensky, A., 21. Kerensky Government (Provisional Government), 10, 11, 12, 13, 15. Khlebnikov, V., 10, 31, 32, 54. Klyun, I., 54, 69. Koloskov, A., 128-132. Kom-Fut (Communists-Futurists), 37^40. Korolyov, B., 69. Krinsky, V., 69. Kruchonykh, A., 10, 32, 54, 123. Kushner, B„ 7, 31, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 62, 69, 118. Kuzmin, M., 11. Larionov, M., 12.

72, 78, 30, 31, 65, 66,

18, 19, 28, 29, 43, 58,

New Lef (The New Left Front of Arts), 87, 98. New Life, 15, 19. Octobrists (Onlitguardists), 77, 82, 83,84, 85, 87, 89, 93. Opoyaz (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), 8, 9, 22, 31, 54, 78, 86. Pasternak, B., 31, 32, 82, 116, 117. Pertsov, V., 101. Plekhanov, G., 87. Poets' Cafe, 20, 25, 27, 60. Polivanov, E., 7, 8, 32. Polonskaya, V., 104, 105-106, 131. Polonsky, V., 35, 82, 83, 94-97.

INDEX

157

Symbolists, Russian, 3. Popova, L., 31, 70. Press and Revolution, 83, 104. Primakov, V., 112, 118. Tarabukin, N., 69. "Productive art," 49. Tatlin, V., 30, 31, 57, 68. Proletkult (Proletarian culture), 15-16, Thomson, B., 92. 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 36, 37, 38, 46, Tikhonov, N., 100. 47, 58, 61, 76, 77. Tolstoy, L., 63, 96. Pudovkin, V., 122. Toporkov, A., 69. Puni, I., 31. Trenin, V., 121. Punin, N„ 11, 17, 19, 30, 31, 58, 118. Tretyakov, S„ 75, 101, 118. Triolet, E., (sister of Lily Brik), 2. Pushkin, A., 45, 46, 63. Trotsky, L., 15, 16, 22, 44, 80, 82, 83,95, 128. Raphael, S., 46. Rapp (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, Udaltsova, N., 69. 105, 107, 114, 115, 116. Union of Art Workers, 11, 13, 18, 26, 29. Red Virgin Soil, 77, 83, 93. Union of Soviet Writers, 114-115. Ref (Revolutionary Front of Arts), 98, 99, 100. Vesnin, V., 70. Reisner, L., 17. Vertov, D., 75. Rodchenko, A., 31,54,57,63,64,66,81. Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops), 58-61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, Sarabyanov, S., 57, 71. 68, 70. Section of Fine Arts (Izo), 25-26, 27, 30, Voronsky, A., 77, 78, 82, 83, 128. 31, 32, 46, 48, 49, 51, 58. Vorontsov, A., 128-131. Selvinsky, I., 82. Semyonova, E., 62. Yakovleva, T., 104, 105, 128-131. Senkin, S., 65. Yakulov, G„ 35, 70. Shklovsky, V., 7, 31, 104, 122, 123. Shterenberg, D., 30, 31, 39, 40, 58, 65, Yazykov, N., 7. Yezhov, N„ 119. 66, 68. Yakubinsky, L., 7, 32. "Social Commission," 80, 94-98. Yuon, K„ 66. Stalin, J., 40, 118, 119. Stenberg, G., 31, 60. Stenberg, V., 31, 60. Zhadova, L., 71. Stepanova, O., 57. Zhemchuzhnaya, 104. Stepanova, V., 31, 70. Zhemchuzhny, V., 105. Svomas (Free artistic workshops), 49-51. Zubov, V., 18, 19.