The lounger, still carrying the drill, shooed the children away to the other side of the square and then came and sat on the bench next to Grekov, who at once tried to strike up a conversation.
“Another one bites the dust,” he said cheerfully.
“Seven this month,” came the gruff reply.
“You don’t say! Where do you put them all?”
“Scrap heap…of history.”
“No, seriously,” Grekov insisted, and demonstrated his good faith by taking off one glove and offering a cigarette, which was gladly accepted. “What happens to them? I’m a student, you see. I’m making a study of monuments.”
“A man after my own heart,” said the worker, adopting a tone that was ingratiatingly earnest. “Let’s see now. First, the bronze ones. The bronze ones are melted down and reshaped into useful objects like door-knockers and railings. Then the ones of stone: those are crushed into gravel and scattered on the paths in our public parks so that the citizens don’t come a cropper. Now for the marble ones – not too many of those – and the ones of display-quality granite: the beautiful ones are sliced up for tombstones and carved into monuments of the new heroes – only smaller, of course, to accommodate the new noses and ears. But the ugly ones, like this one, have to be kept, or rather preserved, because they were made by famous artists long ago, whose names escape me for the moment, and they have to be cleaned up and put in museums. There’s a heap of them at Vnukovo, behind the bus terminus.”
“At Vnukovo, you say.”
At that moment the crane’s engines began to roar and drowned out the conversation.
The head wouldn’t budge. The chains sang like rubber bands and the lorry rocked on its hydraulic legs, but the bone and sinew of that stubborn neck held fast. The pedestal shivered. Then there was a crack like a whiplash, a ruff of white dust burst from under the jawbone and the head tore loose and bobbed wildly at the end of the chains. It was so startling to see this gigantic object bouncing playfully on the air, like a child’s ball, while the lorry swayed perilously on its legs, that Grekov recoiled in fright.
The head was lowered onto the lorry and secured with a multitude of cables. It was made to look backwards, but whether by accident or design Grekov could not tell. A fifth worker, who had been sleeping in the cab, now came to life and drove the lorry away down Bulkin Street. His comrades posed on the rigging around the head like revellers on a Mardi Gras float. One of them had his foot propped in a dilated nostril, another scratched his back on the tip of a moustache. But despite all these little distractions, these buzzing flies, the eyes gazed back unflinchingly, and there was such a forbidding set to the bottom lip that Grekov took his hands out of his pockets and stood up. The lorry turned right at the end of the street and at last the stony gaze was broken.
The children had gone indoors, the watchers had withdrawn from the windows and the peep-holes had misted over again. Grekov was alone. He went to the pedestal and walked around it in both directions. There was no inscription. A single thread of iron, a severed spine twisting from the concrete, marked the spot where the head had stood. The head of Lenin. It was hard to imagine something else in its place. But that’s the one certainty we have, he thought. There will be something in its place.
He sat down with his back against the pedestal and took the letter out of his pocket. He examined the winged beast again, and failed to identify it. Then he took off his gloves, opened the envelope and spread flat the sheet of white paper it contained. Although Grekov had almost forgotten the fact, this was not the original letter, but a version of it twice removed. He had dared to keep the envelope, but keeping the letter itself had been impossible. Instead he had made a copy of the letter in his own hand, and this was a carbon copy of that. The original English was there, word for word, but there were also notes of his own, in parentheses and footnotes – guesses at meanings, useful turns of phrase culled from memory and the dictionary, corrections of spelling mistakes. This was a translation method he had devised himself, in the absence of tape recorders and word processors, and although it was primitive he was proud of it.
There were also speculations – contained in a series of marginal notes and questions – that exceeded the bounds of his responsibilities as a translator and partly explained why the seat of his pants was stuck to the plinth of an empty pedestal in a public square on a Sunday afternoon: Who is this man Khumalo? Is he serious? What does he really want? Will he get it? Who will help him? Me (of all people)?
Grekov read the letter through again, although he practically knew it by heart. In a dimple in the middle of the sheet his eye came to a tight spring of black hair. It was in fact a hair from Boniface Khumalo’s head, which Grekov’s brisk walk had dislodged from a corner of the envelope and shaken into the folded sheet. But Grekov, understandably, failed to recognize it. He blew it into space in a cloud of steam.
II
Khumalo to the Ministir
(with selected notes by P. Grekov)
“Boniface Tavern”
PO Box 7350 Atteridgeville 0008
Tvl [Transvaal – peruse map]
5th Jan[uary] 1992
TO WHO[M] IT MAY CONCERN
Re: SURPLUS STATUES [in the matter of/concerning]
I am greeting you in the name of struggling masses of South Africa, comrades, freedom fighters, former journeymen to Moscow – you may know some…[Never met a military trainee, but believe they existed.] Also in the name of boergious countrymen known up and down [business “contacts”? class alliances?] here at home. I myself am very much struggle [struggling – infamous Apartheid].
My particular personality is illustrious. I am doing many things well: initially gardening assistance, packer O.K. Bazaars [so-called “baas”], garage attendance, petroljoggie [prob. brand-name cf. Texaco], currently taverner and taxi-owner, 1 X Toyota Hi-Ace 2.2 GLX (1989) [Japanese motor vehicle] so far – “See me now, see me no more.” But especially now I am going on as Proprietor (Limited) Boniface Tavern, address above-mentioned, soon revamped as V.I. Lenin Bar & Grill. This is my very serious plan. You must believe it!
Hence it is I am taking up space to search out whether spare statues of V.I. Lenin are made available to donate me or if necessary I would be obliged to purchase on the most favourable terms (lay-by). [In a nut-case: His overweening desire is to buy a statue of Lenin. One can’t help but bravo.] Please state prefference [one f], down payment, interest rates, postage, etc. etc.
Apartheid is crumpling as you know. Recently you visited a New South Africa to espy trade opportunities. [Trade Missionary to S.A. – check w. Grigoriev.] Here is one! I mean business! Fantastical benefits may amount to all of us. V.I. Lenin Bar & Grill is opening (1st May for publicity stunts) with unheard parties and festivities, free booze, braaid sheep [barbecued mutton], cows [beef], chipniks [prostitutes], members of the medias (TV 2 and 3, Mnet [!]), Lucky Dube [sweepstake?], Small Business Development Corporation (SDBC) [Grig?], wide-scale representatives from organizations (SACP, ANC, PAC, ACA, FAWU, MAWU, BAWU, etc. etc.). [Check] It will be a big splash [make a splash – attract much attention] for tourism and international relations.
As far as I’m concerned nothing can prevent my request to pass. I have pedestals galore and many other statues to compliment my favourite V.I. Lenin. Also recognition to be attached viz. [videlicet: namely] “This Beautiful Monument was donated to Working People of Atteridgeville by Kind Masses of Russia, unveiled 1st May 1992 (Is there time?) by Jay Naidoo (for example).”
After three weeks and no reply has forthcome I’ll write again, not meaning to plead to you.
Amandla! [interj. Power! Usually A. ngawetu]
Yours faithfully,
Boniface Khumalo
Proprietor (Ltd)
* * *
—
PS If you are not the right person please forward this letter to the same. Thank you.
PSS Toyota 10-seater is blood-red. MVM325T. Thanks.
III
Lunacharski and Lenin
(an offcut)
and in 1918 Proletkult declared that the proletariat should assimilate existing bourgeois culture and “recast the material in the crucible of its own class-consciousness”.6 Lunacharski himself argued against gimmicky experimentation: “The independence of proletarian art does not consist in artificial originality but presupposes an acquaintance with all the fruits of the preceding culture.”7 We may assume that as Commissar of Enlightenment – he had become head of the People’s Commissariat for Education and the Arts (NARKOMPROS) in 1917 – Lunacharski knew only too well that experimental work would be incomprehensible to the illiterate masses. In the coming years Lunacharski and Lenin would clash over the position of Proletkult, with Lenin trying to subordinate it to NARKOMPROS and the Party, and Lunacharski arguing for a measure of independence.
These differences notwithstanding, Lunacharski looked back on the immediate post-revolutionary years with some nostalgia. In 1933, the year of his death, he recalled Lenin’s scheme for “Propaganda by Monuments” and sought to revive it. His reminiscences tell us something about the complex relationship between the two men and the vexed question of the role of art in the revolution.
Lenin’s taste in art was conventional; he was fiercely opposed to the avant-garde, especially to futurism. Lunacharski recalled an episode during the 1905 revolution when Lenin passed the night in the house of Comrade D.I. Leshenko. Here he came across a set of Hermann Knackfuss’s books on great artists and spent the night paging through one volume after the other. The next morning he told Lunacharski how sorry he was that he had never had time to occupy himself with art. “What an attractive field the history of art is. How much work there for a communist.”8
How did “Propaganda by Monuments” come about? According to Lunacharski, the idea was sparked off by the frescos in Campanella’s La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun). In the Utopian state depicted in this work, frescos were used to educate the young. Lenin, mindful of the straitened circumstances in which many of the artists of Moscow and Petrograd found themselves (the latter would be renamed Leningrad only in 1924), but mindful too that frescos would hardly suit the Russian climate, proposed that artists be commissioned to sculpt “concise, trenchant inscriptions showing the more lasting, fundamental principles and slogans of Marxism”9 on the city walls and on specially erected pediments, in place of advertisements and posters.
“Please don’t think I have my heart set on marble, granite and gold lettering,” Lenin went on (in Lunacharski’s reconstruction of their dialogue). “We must be modest for the present. Let it be concrete with clear, legible inscriptions. I am not at the moment thinking of anything permanent or even long-lasting. Let it even be of a temporary nature.”
“It’s a wonderful idea,” Lunacharski said, “but surely what you propose is work for a monumental mason. Our artists will become bored if they have to spend their days carving inscriptions. You know how they lust after novelty.”
“Well, it happens that I consider monuments even more important than inscriptions: I mean busts, full-length figures, perhaps – what do you call them? – bas-reliefs, groups. And let’s not forget heads.”
Lenin proposed that a list of the forerunners of Socialism, revolutionists and other heroes of culture be drawn up, from which suitable works in plaster and concrete could be commissioned.
It is important that these works should be intelligible to the masses, that they should catch the eye. It is also important that they should be designed to withstand our climate, at least to some extent, that they should not be easily marred by wind, rain and frost. Of course, inscriptions on the pedestals of monuments could be made – if such trifles are beneath your artists, perhaps the stonemasons will oblige us – explaining who the man was and so forth.
Particular attention should be paid to the ceremonies of unveiling such monuments. In this we ourselves and other Party members could help, perhaps also prominent specialists could be invited to speak on such occasions. Every such unveiling ceremony should be a little holiday and an occasion for propaganda. On anniversary dates mention of the given great man could be repeated, always, of course, showing his connection with our revolution and its problems.10
Lunacharski was consumed with the idea and immediately set about putting it into practice. Some inscriptions were set up on buildings, and quite a few monuments by sculptors in Moscow and Petrograd were erected. Not all the monuments were successful. Some of them broke. Perhaps the artists had misjudged the climate after all. A full figure of Marx by Matveyev cracked in half and was replaced by a less impressive bronze head. Other monuments were simply too ugly, and here the artists were definitely at fault. Moscow’s statue of Marx and Lenin in “some sort of basin”11 was the most notorious failure. The citizens dubbed it “the whiskered bathers” or “Cyril and Methodius,” because it made Marx and Lenin look like a pair of brotherly saints emerging from a bath-tub.
The modernists and futurists ran amok. Korolev’s statue of Bakunin was so hideous that horses shied when they passed it, even though it was hidden behind boards. It proved to be “of a temporary nature.” No sooner had the statue been unveiled than the anarchists, incensed by its depiction of their hero, smashed it to pieces.
But although the manufacture of monuments left much to be desired, “the unveiling of monuments went on much better.”12 Taking to heart Lenin’s suggestion that “we ourselves could help,” Lunacharski himself unveiled a string of monuments.
A contest was organized to choose a design for a statue of Marx, and both Lunacharski and Lenin participated enthusiastically in the judging. A well-known sculptor proposed a statue of Marx standing somewhat acrobatically on four elephants, but it was rejected – after personal adjudication by Lenin – as inappropriate. In the end a rather splendid design by a collective, working under the guidance of Aleshin, was chosen. It showed Marx with his feet firmly on the ground and his hands behind his back. The group built a small model of the statue in Sverdlov Square in time for that year’s May Day celebrations, and Lenin approved of it although he did not think it a good likeness. The hair in particular was not very well done, and Lunacharski was asked to tell the artist to “make the hair more nearly right.”13 The torso was also too stout: Marx seemed about to burst the buttons of his coat, and some subtle tailoring was called for. Later Lenin officiated at a ceremony in the Square to “place the podium”14 and made a remarkable speech on Marx and his “flaming spirit”15 – but the statue was never erected.
Lenin was disappointed by the quality of the monuments erected in Moscow, and not reassured to hear from Lunacharski that those in Petrograd were better. “Anatoli Vassilievich,” he said sadly, shaking his head, “have the gifted ones all gathered in Petrograd and the hacks remained here with us?”
And so “Propaganda by Monuments” petered out.
A decade later, when Lunacharski tried to revive the scheme, he used Lenin’s own words (although he closed his ears to the echo):
For the time being, I do not expect marble and granite, gold lettering and bronze – so appropriate to socialist style and culture. It is too early as yet for this – but, it seems to me, a second wave of propaganda by monuments, more lasting and more mature, also more effective for being enriched by the vital human element of sculpture, could be instituted by
IV
Christov to Khumalo
(translated and annotated by P. Grekov)
Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations
32/34 Smolenskaya Sennaya
MOSCOW 121200
28 January 1992
My dear Mr B. Khumalo,
It is with rather a great deal of pleasure that I pen this missive, reactionary to yours of the 5th inst.
&
nbsp; Some weeks may have passed, indeed, as your request flew from subtropical Pretoria, administrative capital of the Repudlic of South Africa, to our correspondent temperate urbanity, and henceforward overland to various ministries and departments, videlicet Foreign Affairs – to whom it had been addressed on the bottom line, so to speak – Trade, Tourism, Defence, and Foreign Economic Relations, where it still resides and from whence this missive now therefore emanates. I am a member of the same Ministry, sad to say in a somewhat subsidiary position (Protocol Department), but nevertheless by good fortune required to acknowledge the landing of your letter of the 5th inst. [I, contrarily, am a respected colleague of Everyday Services Department, City of Moscow, which we write “Mockba.”– Tr.]
I am instructed to inform you that your letter is receiving considerate attention at many and various levels, local and national/ international. Soon we will pen additional missives to impart the final decision-making process and details.
[Feeling overwhelmingly cocksure that your request re: SURPLUS STATUE will meet with a big okey-dokey fairly forthwith, I make bold to expand the range and scope of the instructions by informing, firstly, that the surplus statue videlicet “Head of V.I. Lenin” which is in mind for dispatch to you is somewhat a national treasure. Materially it is stone. Proportionally it is large, without laying it on thick one says “colossal,” being by estimation 7 (seven) metres high, chin to crown, and 17 (seventeen) metres in circumference, at hat-brim level (but has no hat). Imperial equivalences for convenience: 23 feet by 56 feet approx. Will this serve? It will necessitate Herculean efforts in the transportation, but well worth it.
On a new thread. What is doing in the Transvaal? Do the cows and sheep graze on the veldt nearby free from harm? Much has been said and supposed vis-à-vis socio-political machinations of reformism in your motherland of which I am always an amateur or eager beaver as they say. But the horse’s mouth is what you are. Your tidings have captivated me boots and all. Please correspond. – Tr.]
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