Leon
Trotsky: The Suicide of Vladimir Maïakovsky
May
1930
[Leon
Trotsky on Literature and Art, New York ²1972, p. 174-178]
Even
Blok recognized in Maïakovsky an "enormous talent."
Without exaggeration it can be said that Maïakovsky had the spark of
genius. But his was not a harmonious talent. After all, where could
artistic harmony come from in these decades of catastrophe, across
the unsealed chasm between two epochs? In Mayakovsky's work the
summits stand side by side with abysmal lapses. Strokes of genius are
marred by trivial stanzas, even by loud vulgarity.
It
is not true that Maïakovsky was first of all a revolutionary and
after that a poet, although he sincerely wished it were so. In fact
Maïakovsky was first of all
a
poet,
an artist, who rejected the old world without breaking with it. Only
after the revolution did he seek to find support for himself in the
revolution, and to a significant degree he succeeded in doing so; but
he did not merge with it totally, for he did not come to it during
his years of inner formation, in his youth. To view the question in
its broadest dimensions, Maïakovsky was not only the "singer,"
but also the victim, of the epoch of transformation, which while
creating elements of the new culture with unparalleled force, still
did so much more slowly and contradictorily than necessary for the
harmonious development of an individual poet or a generation of poets
devoted to the revolution. The absence of inner harmony flowed from
this very source and expressed itself in the poet's style, in the
lack of sufficient verbal discipline and measured imagery. There is a
hot lava of pathos side by side with an inappropriate palsy-walsy
attitude toward the epoch and the class, or an outright tasteless
joking which the poet seems to erect as a barrier against being hurt
by the external world. Sometimes this seemed to be not only
artistically but even psychologically false. But no, even the
pre-suicide letters are in the same tone. That is the import of the
phrase, "the incident is dosed," with which the poet sums
himself up. We would say the following: that which, in the latter-day
Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, was lyricism and irony (irony against
lyricism but at the same time in defense of it), is in the latter-day
"futurist" Vladimir Maïakovsky a mixture of pathos and
vulgarity (vulgarity against pathos but also as protection for it).
The
official report on the suicide hastens to declare, in the language of
judicial protocol as edited in the "Secretariat," that the
suicide of Maïakovsky "has nothing In common with the public
and literary activity of the poet." That is to say, that the
willful death of Maïakovsky was in no way connected with his life or
that his life had nothing in common with his revolutionary-poetic
work. In a word, this turns his death into an adventure out of the
police records. This is untrue, unnecessary, and stupid. "The
ship was smashed up on everyday life," says Maïakovsky in his
pre-suicide poems about his intimate personal life. This means that
"public and literary activity" ceased
to carry him high enough over the shoals of everyday life — not
enough to save him from unendurable personal shocks.
How can they say "has nothing in common with"!
The
current official ideology of "proletarian literature" is
based — we see the same thing in the artistic sphere as in the
economic — on a total lack of understanding of the rhythms
and' periods of time
necessary for cultural maturation. The struggle for "proletarian
culture" — something on the order of the "total
collectivization" of all humanity’s gains within the span of a
single five-year plan — had at the beginning of the October
Revolution the character of utopian idealism, and it was precisely on
this basis that it was rejected by Lenin and the author of these
lines. In recent years it has become simply a system of bureaucratic
command over art and a way of impoverishing it. The incompetents of
bourgeois literature, such as Serafimovich, Gladkov, and others, have
been declared the classical masters of this pseudo-proletarian
literature. Facile nonentities like Averbach are christened the
Belinskys of … "proletarian" (!) literature. The top
leadership in the sphere of creative writing is put in the hands of
Molotov, who is a living negation of everything creative in human
nature Molotov's chief helper — going from bad to worse — is none
other than Gusev, an adept in various fields but not in art. This
selection of personnel is totally in keeping with the bureaucratic
degeneration in the official spheres of the revolution. Molotov and
Gusev have raised up over
literature a collective Malashkin, the pornographic literariness of a
sycophant "revolutionary" with sunken nose.
The
best representatives of the proletarian youth who were summoned to
assemble the basic
elements
of a new literature and culture have been placed under the command of
people who convert their personal lack of culture into the measure of
all things.
Yes,
Maïakovsky was braver and more heroic than any other of the last
generation of old Russian literature, yet was unable to win the
acceptance of that literature and sought ties with the revolution.
And yes, he achieved those ties much more fully than any other. But a
profound inner split remained with him. To the general contradictions
of revolution — always difficult for art, which seeks perfected
forms — was added the decline of the last few years, presided over
by the epigones. Ready to serve the "epoch" in the dirty
work of everyday life, Maïakovsky could not help being repelled by
the pseudo-revolutionary officialdom, even though he was not able to
understand it theoretically and therefore could not find the way to
overcome it. The poet rightfully speaks of himself as "one who
is not for hire." For a long time he furiously opposed entering
Averbach's administrative collective of so-called proletarian
literature. From this came his repeated attempts to create, under the
banner of LEF, an order of frenzied crusaders for proletarian
revolution who would serve it out of conscience rather than fear. But
LEF was of course unable to impose its rhythms upon "the 150
million." The dynamics of the ebbing and flowing currents of the
revolution is far too profound and weighty for that.
In
January of this year Maïakovsky, defeated by the logic of the
situation, committed violence against himself and finally entered
VAPP (the All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers). That was two
or three months before his suicide. But this added nothing and
probably detracted something. When the poet liquidated his accounts
with the contradictions of "everyday life," both private
and public, sending his "ship" to the bottom, the
representatives of bureaucratic literature, those who are for hire,
declared it was "inconceivable, incomprehensible," showing
not only that the great poet Maïakovsky remained "incomprehensible"
for them, but also the contradictions of the epoch "inconceivable."
The
compulsory, official Association of Proletarian Writers, barren
ideologically, was erected upon a series of preliminary pogroms
against vital and genuinely revolutionary literary groupings.
Obviously it has provided no moral cement. If at the passing of the
greatest poet of Soviet Russia there comes from this corner only
officialdom's perplexed response — "there is no connection,
nothing in common" — this is much too little, much, much too
little, for the building of a new culture "in the shortest
possible time."
Maïakovsky
was not and could not become a direct progenitor of "proletarian
literature" for the same reason that it is impossible to build
socialism in one country. But in the battles of the transitional
epoch he was a most courageous fighter of the word and became an
undoubted precursor of the literature of the new society.