very interested in the Red Army's programme of physical culture (synchronized gymnastics and all that) and in 1921 he even took command of a special theatre section for physical culture in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which aimed to use the army's system of gymnastics for the 'scientific organization of labour' in an experimental military settlement.68 This aspect of labour management was the crucial difference between biomechanics and the Delsarte-Dalcrozean school. Meyerhold envisaged the actor as an artist-engineer who organizes the 'raw material' of his own body on the scientific principles of time and motion. He saw his system as the theatrical equivalent of 'scientific management' in industry. Like all the Bolsheviks, he was particularly influenced by the theories of the American engineer F. W. Taylor, who used 'time and motion' studies to divide and automate the labour tasks of industry.
Lenin was a huge fan of Taylorism. Its premise that the worker was the least efficient part of the whole manufacturing process accorded with his view of the Russian working class. He saw Taylorism's 'scientific' methods as a means of discipline that could remould the worker and society along more controllable and regularized lines. All this was of a piece with the modernist belief in the power of machines to transform man and the universe. Meyerhold's enthusiasm for mechanics was widely shared by the avant-garde. One can see it in the Futurists' idealization of technology; in the fascination with machines which pervades the films of Eisenstein and Vertov; in the exaltation of factory production in left-wing art; and in the industrialism of the Constructivists. Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylor and of another great American industrialist, Henry Ford, inventor of the egalitarian Model 'T', which flourished throughout Russia at this time: even remote villagers knew the name of Henry Ford (some of them believed he was a sort of god who organized the work of Lenin and Trotsky).
The most radical exponent of the Taylorist idea was Aleksei Gastev, the Bolshevik engineer and poet who envisaged the mechanization of virtually every aspect of life in Soviet Russia, from methods of production to the thinking patterns of the common man. A friend of Meyerhold, Gastev may have been the first person to use the term 'biomechanics', sometime around 1922.69 As a 'proletarian poet' (the 'Ovid of engineers, miners and metalworkers', as he was described by
fellow poet Nikolai Aseev),70 Gastev conjured up the vision of a future communist society in which man and machine merged. His verse reverberates to the thunderous sounds of the blast furnace and the factory siren. It sings its liturgy to an 'iron messiah' who will reveal the brave new world of the fully automated human being.
As head of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1920, Gastev carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly, for instance, by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine, so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' - a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian (and Czech) verb 'to work': rabotat'. Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought bio-mechanization would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed, he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a Utopia where 'people' would be replaced by 'proletarian units' identified by ciphers such as 'A, B, C, or 325, 075, o, and so on'. These automatons would be like machines, 'incapable of individual thought', and would simply obey their controller. A 'mechanized collectivism' would 'take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat'. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured 'by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer'.71 This was the Soviet paradise Zamyatin satirized in his novel We, which depicts a futuristic world of rationality and high technology, with robot-like beings who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are controlled in every way by the One State and its Big Brother-like ruler, the Benefactor. Zamyatin's novel was the inspiration of George Orwell's 1984.72
Thanks to the influence of Meyerhold, two great artists were brought into the orbit of the cinema. One was Dmitry Shostakovich, who worked at Meyerhold's theatre from 1928 to 1929, during which time, influenced no doubt by its production of The Government Inspector, he composed his Gogolian opera The Nose (1930). In his student
days, between 1924 and 1926, Shostakovich had worked as a piano accompanist for silent movies at the Bright Reel cinema on Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad.73 It set the pattern for his life - composing for the cinema to earn some extra money and keep himself out of trouble (in total he would score the music for over thirty films).74
Writing for the screen had a major influence on Shostakovich's composing style, as it did on the whole Soviet music school.75 The big film sound of the Soviet orchestra and the need for tuneful melodies to appeal to the masses are obvious enough. No composer in the twentieth century wrote more symphonies than Shostakovich; none wrote better tunes than Prokofiev - in both cases certainly an effect of writing for the cinema. Films using montage, in particular, demanded new techniques of musical composition to reflect their polyphonic dramaturgy. They required a new rhythmic treatment and faster harmonic shifts to deal with their constant cross-cutting between the frames,* the sharp joins between the scenes, and to highlight the associations between themes and visual images. These cinematic qualities are discernible in many of Shostakovich's works - notably the music for The Nose and his Third ('May Day') Symphony (1930), with its fast-paced montage of musical tableaux. Shostakovich once explained that in writing his film music he did not follow the standard Western principle of illustration or accompaniment, but sought rather to connect a series of sequences with one musical idea - so that in this sense it was the music which revealed the 'essence and the idea of the film'.76 The music was to be an added element of the montage. This ideal was best expressed in Shostakovich's first film score, for The New Babylon (1929), a cinematic reconstruction of the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune in 1871. As its director Kozintsev explained, the purpose of the music was not just to reflect or illustrate the action but to take an active part in it by communicating to the audience the film's underlying emotions.77
Meyerhold's other new recruit to the cinema was the poet Maya-kovsky, who wrote some thirteen film scenarios and (a man of
* Soviet films that used montage had a far higher number of different shots (in October, for example, there were 3,200 shots) compared to the average (around 600) in conventional Hollywood films during the 1920s.
extraordinary looks) starred in several films as well. Meyerhold and Mayakovsky had been close friends since before the war. They shared the same far-left outlook on politics and theatre which found expression in their partnership on Mystery Bouffe. Mayakovsky played the part of the 'Person of the Future' - a proletarian deus ex machina who appeared on stage hanging from the ceiling - in the first (1918) production of his play. It was, he said, referring to himself and Meyerhold, 'our revolution in poetry and theatre. The mystery is the greatness of the action - the bouffe the laughter in it.'78 Mayakovsky spread his talents wide: to his poetry and his work in theatre and the cinema, he added journalism, writing radio songs and satires, drawing cartoons with brief captions for the lubok-like propaganda posters of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and creating advertising jingles for state stores and slogans for the banners which appeared on every street. His poetry was immersed in politics, even his intimate love lyrics to his mistress Lily Brik, and a good deal of his best-known verse, like the allegory 150,000,000 (1921), a Soviet parody of the bylina, which tells the story of the battle between Ivan, the leader of the 150 million Russian workers, and the Western capitalist villain Woodrow Wilson, was agitational. Mayakovsky's terse, iconoclastic style was tailor-made for po
litical effect in a country such as Russia where the lubok and chastushka (a simple, often bawdy, rhyming song) had real roots in the mass consciousness, and he imitated both these literary forms.
Forward, my country,
move on faster! Get on with it,
sweep away the antiquated junk! Stronger, my commune,
strike at the enemy, Make it die out,
that monster, the old way of life.79
Mayakovsky embraced revolution as a quickening of time. He longed to sweep away the clutter of the past, the 'petty-bourgeois' domesticity of the 'old way of life' (byt), and to replace it with a higher
and more spiritual existence (bytie).* The battle against byt was at the heart of the Russian revolutionary urge to establish a more communistic way of life.80 Mayakovsky hated byt. He hated all routine. He hated all the banal objects in the 'cosy home': the samovar, the rubber plant, the portrait of Marx in its little frame, the cat lying on old copies of Izvestiia, the ornamental china on the mantelpiece, the singing canaries.
From the wall Marx watches and watches
And suddenly
Opening his mouth wide,
He starts howling:
The Revolution is tangled up in philistine threads
More terrible than Wrangelf is philistine byt
Better
To tear off the canaries' heads -
So communism
Won't be struck down by canaries.81
In much of his writing Mayakovsky talked of his desire to escape this humdrum world of material things ('it will turn us all into philis-tines') and to fly away, like a figure from Chagall, to a higher spiritual realm. This is the theme of his long poem Pro eto (About This) (1923), written in the form of a love song to Lily Brik, with whom he was living, on and off, in Petersburg and Moscow in a menage a trois with her husband, the left-wing poet and critic Osip Brik. In his autobiography Mayakovsky records that he wrote the poem 'about our way of life in general but based on personal material'. He said it was a poem 'about byt, and by this I mean a way of life which has not changed at all and which is our greatest enemy'.82Pro eto chronicles Mayakovsky's response to a two-month separation imposed by Lily Brik in December 1922. In it, the hero, a poet living all alone in his
* The word byt ('way of life') derived from the verb byvat', meaning to happen or take plat e. But from the nineteenth century, bytie took on the positive idea of 'meaningful existence' which became central to the Russian intellectual tradition, while byt became increasingly associated with the negative aspects of the 'old' way of life. + Leader of the White armies in southern Russia during the civil war.
29. Alexander Rodchenko: illustration from Mayakovsky's Pro eto (1923)
tiny room while his lover Lily carries on with her busy social and domestic life, dreams about a poem he wrote before 1917 in which a Christ-like figure, a purer version of his later self, prepares for the coming revolution. The despairing hero threatens to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Neva river: his love for Lily compli-
cates his own crisis of identity, because in his imagination she is tied to the 'petty-bourgeois' byt of Russia in the NEP, which has diverted him from the ascetic path of the true revolutionary. This betrayal leads to a dramatic staging of the narrator's crucifixion, which then gives way to the redemptive vision of a future communist Utopia, where love is no longer personal or bodily in form but a higher form of brotherhood. At the climax of the poem the narrator catapults himself a thousand years into the future, to a world of communal love, where he pleads with a chemist to bring him back to life:
Resurrect me -
I want to live my share! Where love will not be - a servant of marriages,
lust,
money. Damning the bed,
arising from the couch, love will stride through the universe.83
4
In 1930, at the age of thirty-seven, Mayakovsky shot himself in the communal flat in which he had lived, near the Lubianka building in Moscow, when the Briks would not have him. Suicide was a constant theme in Mayakovsky's poetry. The poem he wrote for his suicide note quotes (with minor alterations) from an untitled and unfinished poem written probably in the summer of 1929:
As they say,
a bungled story. Love's boat
smashed
against existence. And we are quits with life.
So why should we idly reproach each other
with pain and insults? To those who remain - I wish happiness.84
The Briks explained his suicide as the 'unavoidable outcome of Mayakovsky's hyperbolic attitude to life'.85 His transcendental hopes and expectations had crashed against the realities of life. Recent evidence has led to claims that Mayakovsky did not kill himself. Lily Brik, it has been revealed, was an agent of the NKVD, Stalin's political police, and informed it of the poet's private views. In his communal flat there was a concealed entrance through which someone could have entered Mayakovsky's room, shot the poet and escaped unnoticed by neighbours. Notes discovered in the archives of his close friend Eisenstein reveal that Mayakovsky lived in fear of arrest. 'He had to be removed - so they got rid of him,' concluded Eisenstein.86
Suicide or murder, the significance of the poet's death was clear: there was no longer room in Soviet literature for the individualist. Mayakovsky was too rooted in the pre-revolutionary age, and his tragedy was shared by all the avant-garde who, like him, threw in their lot with the new society. The last works of Mayakovsky had been viciously attacked by the Soviet authorities. The press condemned The Bedbug (1929), a dazzling satire on Soviet manners and the new bureaucracy, with a sparkling score by Shostakovich which added to the montage by having several bands play different types of music (from classical to foxtrot) on and off the stage.87 They said the play had failed to portray the Soviet future in heroic terms. 'We are brought to the conclusion', complained one reviewer, 'that life under socialism will be very dull in 1979' (it was, it turned out, an accurate portrayal of the Brezhnev years).88 His next play, The Bath House, which opened in Meyerhold's theatre in Moscow just one month before the poet's death, was an awful flop, and its hilarious critique of Soviet bureaucrats again roundly condemned in the press. But the final straw was Mayakovsky's retrospective exhibition of his artwork, which he put on in Moscow in March 1930. The exhibition was consciously avoided by the artistic intelligentsia; the poet Olga Berggolts, who went to visit Mayakovsky there, recalls the sight of the 'tall man with a sad and
austere face, his arms folded behind him, as he paced the empty rooms'.89 At an evening devoted to the exhibition, Mayakovsky said that he could no longer achieve what he had set out do - 'to laugh at things I consider wrong… and to bring the workers to great poetry, without hack writing or a deliberate lowering of standards'.90
The activities of RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) made life impossible for non-proletarian writers and 'fellow travellers' like Mayakovsky, who disbanded LEF, the Left Front, and joined RAPP in a last desperate bid to save himself in the final few weeks of his life. Formed in 1928 as the literary wing of Stalin's Five-year Plan for industry, RAPP saw itself as the militant vanguard of a cultural revolution against the old intelligentsia. 'The one and only task of Soviet literature', its journal declared in 1930, 'is the depiction of the Five-year Plan and the class war.'91 The Five-year Plan was intended as the start of a new revolution which would transform Russia into an advanced industrialized state and deliver power to the working class. A new wave of terror began against the so-called 'bourgeois' managers in industry (that is, those who had held their jobs since 1917), and this was followed by a similar assault on 'bourgeois specialists' in the professions and the arts. Supported by the state, RAPP attacked the 'bourgeois enemies' of Soviet literature which it claimed were hidden in the left-wing avant-garde. Just five days before his death, Mayakovsky was condemned at a RAPP meeting at which his critics demanded proof that he would still be read in twenty years.92
By the beginning of th
e 1930s, any writer with an individual voice was deemed politically suspicious. The satirists who flourished in the relatively liberal climate of the 1920s were the first to come under attack. There was Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose moral satires on the empty verbiage of the Soviet bureaucracy and the cramped conditions of communal flats were suddenly considered anti-Soviet in the new political climate of the Five-year Plan, when writers were expected to be positive and the only acceptable subject for satire were the foreign enemies of the Soviet Union. Then there was Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Gogolian satires about censorship (The Crimson Island), daily life in Moscow in the NEP (Adventures of Chichikov), Soviet xenophobia (Fatal Eggs) and his brilliant comic novel The Heart of a Dog (where a Pavlov like experimental scientist transplants the brain and sexual
organs of a dog into a human being) were not only banned from publication but forbidden to be read when passed as manuscripts from hand to hand. Finally, there was Andrei Platonov, an engineer and Utopian communist (until he was expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1926) whose own growing doubts about the human costs of the Soviet experiment were reflected in a series of extraordinary dystopian satires: The Epifan Locks (19Z7), a timely allegory on the grandiose but ultimately disastrous canal-building projects of Peter the Great; Chev-engur (also 1927), a fatal odyssey in search of the true communist society; and The Foundation Pit (1930), a nightmare vision of collectivization in which the foundation pit of a huge communal home for the local proletariat turns out to be a monumental grave for humanity. All three were condemned as 'counter-revolutionary' and banned from publication for over sixty years.
NATASHA Page 54
