The Mayakovsky Tapes Read online

  Mayakovsky had the Tongue-Tied in the palm of his hand now. Fortified by the mocking laugher he had incited, he hollered “Settle down, my kittens,” and, turning to Pasternak, invited him to recite something not yet published. Pasternak, formal to a fault, bowed from the waist in the style of a Russian peasant, then, rising to his feet, said, “I shall say the poem, which I call ‘Hamlet,’ and then repeat it a second time as I am never understood at the first reading. Here,” he went on, “is the Danish Prince Hamlet speaking to his father’s ghost. Or Christ speaking to His Father in the garden of Gethsemane. Or me speaking to you. Who can be sure?”

  I am trying, standing in the door,

  To discover in the distant echoes

  What the coming years may hold in store.

  But the plan of action is determined,

  And the end irrevocably sealed.

  I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:

  Life is not a stroll across a field.

  When he reached the last line and looked up, I remember murmuring to my Osya, “So much for the fireworks you promised.”

  “Wait,” he said, and hoping to light the fuse that would ignite the powder keg, Osip—who, in his youth, had been expelled from school for spreading Bolshevik propaganda—called out, “There are things afoot more important than poetry. Instead of lulling us into a nonalcoholic stupor with your verses, incite us with your views on revolution.”

  “Make no mistake about it, friends,” Mayakovsky said, his eyes suddenly feverish, “revolution, not evolution, is the solution to our tribulations. It’s not a matter of impatience. It’s a matter of justice. Those of us who can see further than our noses embrace the chaos of revolution, we embrace the risk of revolution, we embrace Marx’s dazzling dream of liberating man from ignorance, religious dogmatism, and the class prison into which he was born. Revolution will change the way we perceive this world, the way we relate to one another, the way we love our lovers. Women will be the equal of men in bed and in the workplace. It will free artists from having to drag around fetid creeds like medieval balls and chains. It will permit us to spit out the past, which is stuck like a bone in our throats. It will transform the language we use to describe the world we see. Revolution is the last, best hope for Tsarist Russia. And revolutionary Russia is the last, best hope for the petrified fossil Europe.”

  It was an electrifying moment. This hooligan, this ruffian, this jailbird, this jawbreaker, was saying aloud what many of us were thinking but only dared articulate in the isolation of our flats. I sucked in my breath. I thought I caught a general sucking in of breath and grabbed Osip’s arm, fearing there wouldn’t be enough oxygen left in the room to sustain life. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “Everything is right,” I murmured as a trill resembling a whirlwind passing through the rigging of a sailing ship rose from the crowd.

  A woman’s shrill voice pierced the commotion. “The illustrious anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicted that Marx’s cure—this Utopian dictatorship of the proletariat that you are so impatient for us to embrace—would make Russia sicker than it is under tsarist rule.”

  Shaking his head in disgust, Mayakovsky said, “It is well known that revolution is not for the weak of heart, little lady. Bakunin had a weak heart. He lost his nerve when—”

  Another woman cut him off before he could finish the sentence. “The French took to chopping off the heads of those who lost their nerve for revolution—historians speak of forty thousand executions. If the Bolsheviks resort to Dr. Guillotin’s contraption to preserve our Russian Revolution—”

  I swear to you I can still hear Mayakovsky’s gruff voice in my inner ear responding. Flashing what in other circumstances might have passed for a pained smile, he said, “Our revolution will be shielded from devouring its children by its truth-tellers—”

  “By its poets,” Pasternak corrected him in a stage whisper heard round the room. “What century is it outside? The eighteenth? No, no, the last time I looked it was the twentieth. We Russians have not entombed ourselves in the catacombs of the Kiev churches all these years, oblivious to the real world aboveground. We will not repeat the blunders of those who made revolution in France.”

  A gaunt gentleman, fifty something judging by his close-cropped ash gray hair, politely raised a hand. He was standing with his back against the back wall of the room. I’d noticed him when we first stepped foot in the café—he had a fine Israelite nose not unlike Osip’s and wore a pair of perfectly round steel spectacles that, when they caught the light, transformed his otherwise deep-set eye sockets into two silver coins. Somehow he looked familiar though for the life of me I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him before. The Tongue-Tied, eyeing the raised hand and the gentleman raising it, turned out to be tongue-tied after all. Pasternak called across the room to the man, who was attired in an unseasonably thick brown collarless Viennese jacket and a collarless white shirt buttoned up to a conspicuous Adam’s apple, “There is no need to raise your hand, gospodin—we are not in a schoolroom here. Pose your question.”

  “I don’t have a question, esteemed poet, only a presentiment.”

  Mayakovsky must have recognized the gentleman because he told Pasternak, “We have heard his lyrics before, Boris Leonidovich. He doesn’t believe revolution will change things in Russia.”

  The Israelite at the back of the room smiled wryly. “The carnival that you call revolution—this celebration of Marxist ends justifying morally repugnant means—may or may not change things in Russia for the Russians,” he said. “It most certainly will not change things in Russia for the Jews.”

  And then it hit me where I had seen him. His face had been splashed across posters publicizing a Zionist conference in Moscow several weeks earlier. Osip and I, with our very secular Israelite roots and our abiding interest in things Jewish (I had been deeply involved in the making of the documentary film about Jewish agricultural settlements in the Crimea entitled Jews Work the Land), would have participated, if only to glimpse things from a Zionist perspective; my father, Yury Aleksandrovich, was a prominent Jewish jurist and an ardent anti-Zionist inasmuch as he considered assimilation, not emigration, to be the solution to Jewish tribulations. Yes, we would, as I said, have caught this Israelite’s act at the conference except we had a previous engagement in Petrograd at the time. I regretted not being able to attend. The gentleman with the Israelite nose was known to have been a member of the Zionist delegation that had been trying to convince the British, who had seized Palestine from the Ottoman Turks during the Great War, to look with favor (the wording of a proposed declaration printed in Pravda) on a Jewish national homeland in the Holy Land.

  The Tongue-Tied parted like the Red Sea as the gentleman closed the gap between himself and the poets sitting on their stools. “You, esteemed Boris Pasternak, being Jewish, ought to concentrate on the condition of your fellow Jews. You ought to hear their groan, which is the loudest sound in Europe, louder even than trench mines exploding on the Eastern Front. You are barking up the wrong tree with these Bolsheviks, who are only comfortable with change and turmoil, who propose to make things better for the Russians but say nothing about eradicating twenty centuries of Christian anti-Semitism that fuels pogroms in shtetl after shtetl, year after year.”

  In a commotion of arms and legs, Mayakovsky came flying off his stool. “It goes without saying—”

  The Israelite, clearly a practiced orator with a sharp tongue, turned on the ruffian poet. “It goes with saying, esteemed Mayakovsky, which is what makes your refusal to say it eloquent in a peculiar way.” He approached Pasternak and talked to him directly but in a tone loud enough for everyone to hear. “Jews, whether they be esteemed poets like yourself or lawyers like myself or kulaks who clean the shit out of chicken coops, need to answer the call of the eminent Zionist Theodor Herzl and emigrate to Palestine. We are sick and tired of crawling into the narrow bricked-in spaces we build between two walls to survive the pogroms. Only in their
own homeland can Jews find shelter from the Cossacks of the world. Our Zionist slogan sets out the path for Jews: Palestine is a land without people, the Jews are a people without a land.”

  What can only be described as a churlish murmur arose from the Tongue-Tied, which didn’t surprise me: The Russian intelligentsia doesn’t have a reputation for pro-Jewish bias. Mayakovsky, clearly distressed by this groundswell of anti-Jewish agitation, quelled it with an angry wave of his hand. “After our revolution, there will be no need for Jews to emigrate,” he exclaimed. “The Jew, the Christian, the Muslim, the infidel, the atheist, the agnostic, the pagan, the heretic, the freethinker, the Marxist-skeptic like you, friend, will all belong to the ruling proletariat. This proletariat will own the factories and run the organs of government. The ultimate goal, the ambition of this dictatorship of the proletariat is the abolition of both the dictatorship and the state. Under Communism, neither will exist. At which point discrimination of any color or shape in our classless society will become an artifact of a discredited past.”

  Pasternak’s response to a problem he had obviously thought about was more measured. There was something almost Germanic in his style of speaking—he summoned his words cautiously and delivered them formally, as if lecturing from a podium in a university amphitheater. “The solution to the Jewish question must be found here in Russia if it is to be found at all,” is, as near as I can recollect, what he said. “A democratic and Marxist Russia will pull the rug from under you Zionists by eliminating the need for a Jewish homeland that, in any case, will never see the light of day. For the simple reason that Palestine is not a land without people. According to an article, by a Jewish journalist I might add, in the historical society’s Evreiskaya Starina, there are something like six hundred thousand Arabs presently living in Palestine. Six hundred thousand! What do you Zionists propose to do with this community other than act as if it doesn’t exist?”

  “We will bring European civilization to the native population—we will build schools and hospitals and sewage plants, we will bring tractors to plow their fields, we will bring water from Lake Tiberias to irrigate their crops. In a word, we will pull them along with us into the twentieth century.”

  Mayakovsky was beside himself with scorn for the Zionist project. “You delude yourself into thinking the Muslim masses will accept a Jewish homeland,” he exclaimed. “You delude yourself into thinking Palestinian Arabs will abandon their ancestral lands without a fight.”

  The lawyer, if that’s what he was, angled his head to look at Mayakovsky. Again his eyeglasses caught the light and his eyes were replaced by two silver coins. “If we must take up arms to establish a Jewish homeland,” he said with quiet determination, “rest assured, esteemed poet Mayakovsky, we will.”

  As I reconstruct the scene in my head, I hear Pasternak starting to disburse words, phrases urgently, as if time were running out to dissuade a mischievous child from climbing onto a limb. “If your handful of Zionist settlers were to take up arms against a sea of Arabs, you will certainly lose. If by some miracle you were to win, the winning will surely corrupt your attitude vis-à-vis the colonial project, and this corruption of attitude is bound to prejudice the Arab rights that the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, appears so keen to protect. And that, in turn, will create a vicious cycle of violence. There is an alternative, gospodin: take up arms with us here in Russia. Struggle alongside us to create the planet’s first Communist state, after which none of the millions of Jews living in the Jewish Pale will think it necessary to emigrate.”

  “I am familiar with your poetry, esteemed Boris Pasternak, which explains my presence here tonight. But I never thought I would hear the author of My Sister, Life defend the violence of revolution.”

  “You conveniently forget that I am also the author of Lieutenant Schmidt. The poem’s hero—who is also my hero—naval lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt, was hanged for leading a mutiny on his warship Ochakov during the bungled 1905 revolution in Russia.” I remember Pasternak kneading his brow as if he were suppressing an ache. “You and I have more in common than you are comfortable admitting,” he insisted. “You defend the inevitable violence of your colonial project. I defend—by circuitous means, with difficulty, in muffled tones—what naval lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt defended: the violence of idealism.”

  The Israelite gentleman turned away in disgust. “Not since Voltaire blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity have I heard such utter gibberish. Your precious Marxism is nothing more than a Cinderella story devised to lure the masses with this fairy tale of a workers’ paradise. History teaches nothing to poets who think they can change its course. Gai mit dein kop in drerd—go with your head in the ground, esteemed poet. See how far it gets you.”

  Mayakovsky regarded the gentleman as he shouldered his way past the Tongue-Tied and disappeared through the double doors. “Boris Leonidovich is correct,” he said, breaking the edgy silence that had muted the café. “Revolution is idealism by another name. Hang on my every word: our revolution—for which I have fought since I was thirteen, for which I spent three hundred sixty-seven days, fourteen hours, and twenty minutes in solitary confinement in Butyrka prison cell number 103—our revolution will end the criminal exploitation of the working masses, it will liberate women, it will asphyxiate anti-Semitism and protect the Israelite community. And it will not put a foot wrong in the process. There will be no Thermidor here because there will be no Russian Robespierre, no guillotine in front of the Kremlin, no Reign of Terror.”

  “Does he speak for you, Citizen Pasternak?” a naval cadet wearing an ensign’s uniform hollered from the doorway.

  Pasternak laughed under his breath. “Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse into the last century and grasp the need for change. I stand ready to give revolution in Russia a try as long as it is seen to be in the service of poetry.”

  “You have it ass backward, Boris Leonidovich,” Mayakovsky cried. “The dull roar of the sea, the rotation of the earth, the shrill whistle of a strong wind—everything must be in the service of the Revolution. Poetry, like all the arts and all the crafts, must also be in the service of the Revolution.”

  I remember, as if this all transpired yesterday, Pasternak wagging a finger at Mayakovsky. “You err when you lump art in the same basket with craft,” he said. “The two are a world apart, which is something Pushkin’s Salieri understood when he poisoned Mozart.”

  “It was Salieri who got it right,” I can hear Mayakovsky insisting. “The artist is essentially a craftsman, and literature is essentially a craft no different from other socially useful occupations. It follows, then, that the highest form of literary activity is the most socially useful, which is to say that it helps in the construction of socialism. Thus the activity of the craftsman-poet-revolutionist V. Mayakovsky must serve our mutual client, the proletarian state. Poetry is useless, even immoral if it does less.”

  Pasternak snickered good-naturedly. “You are too ardent by half, Vladimir Vladimirovich. You will revise the lyrics to your song when you experience revolution as opposed to rant about it. You will come to understand that Futurist poetry must serve a higher master than the state. It must offer up an image of the world suffused with the joy of living for a noble cause. Byt na sedmom nebe ot radosti—To be in seventh heaven with joy. Only from the summit of this seventh heaven can the poet purify the Revolution, after which the Revolution can begin to purify the state.”

  I have this image in my mind’s eye of Mayakovsky’s nostrils flaring, a sure sign, I was to discover, that he was stifling his volcanic temper. “You are patronizing me—but I pardon you,” he said.

  I remember Pasternak exploding with laughter, I can hear it in my mind’s ear as I describe it for you. “I accept your pardon,” he intoned in a priest’s voice, and he signed Mayakovsky with the Orthodox cross.

  A short story writer in Pasternak’s camp—I happened to know he had been a priest in a previous incarnation but had been defrocked for sodo
mizing choir boys—called out, “God willing, poetry will purify our corrupt state!”

  The mere mention of God was enough to send Mayakovsky off into an antireligious tirade. Lunging from his stool, throwing off his greatcoat so that it fell across the knees of one of his several female seconds, he cried out, “If God exists, willing or not He must be judged.”

  “Who amongst us would dare to judge God?” Pasternak challenged.

  “I will dare,” Mayakovsky roared. “I have examined the evidence—the mad rush to get creation over and done in six days, the eviction of Adam and Eve from a rent-free Eden for violating the terms of their lease, Noah frantically laying the keel to his floating zoo before God could get around to murdering all of humankind, the torture of the poor lickspittle Job, Abraham’s willingness to murder his own son to appease the thug who went by the patronymic Yahweh. I find this Yahweh guilty of incompetence, guilty of hubris, guilty of arrogance, guilty of complicity in murder (think of Job’s ten children!), guilty of self-indulgence by creating playthings He can lord over to make the eons pass more quickly.”

  A young woman with hair nearly as red as mine (though hers, unlike mine, was obviously dyed) stoked the Poet’s flame. “You are a fine one to talk of hubris, Mayakovsky. There are some who would say you invented it.”

  “I am certainly guilty,” the Poet shot back. “Guilty of wanting to create an Eden on earth ruled by man and not some vengeful God. I am guilty of wanting to create a new, modern poesy suitable to revolution. We call this scandalous bohemian wrecking ball that will unhinge the future from the past Futurism.”

  Clambering onto my chair at the back of the room I called out, “If, as the poet Rilke suggests, the real Russia has buried herself under our perma-frosted ground, will your Futurism become an instrument of excavation? To put it simply, Mayakovsky, does this Futurism of yours actually work?”