The Vanishing Futurist

by Charlotte Hobson

  ‘Oh.’ Reluctant, he straightened up, keeping one hand on the metalwork as if still feeling the PropMash’s pulse.

  ‘Yes, I wanted to ask you to explain a little more about what you said. The task you gave me at the evening meeting on Friday, you know, about being . . . about being as important as anyone else.’

  ‘Of course.’ He frowned. ‘I thought it was clear – you were to remind yourself that you are a full citizen of the world. I meant you have a tendency towards servility.’

  My heart sank, but I was determined to finish what I had come to say. That was the point, after all, wasn’t it? I should stick to my guns. ‘You also said I was as – as lovable as anyone else.’

  He picked up a box of nuts and bolts and began sorting them intently. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nikita, probably it sounds absurd, but I must tell you how deeply I still feel for you. I’m devoted to you . . .’ I was babbling. I took a breath and started again. ‘I can’t help hoping that perhaps, one day, when the commune has achieved its purpose, we might be again . . . you might feel—’

  He interrupted, clearing his throat. ‘Comrade . . . is this necessary? We are all friends within the commune. There’s no need for this exaggerated type of . . . this emotional excess. We have made a promise to each other not only to be chaste, but to give up this type of romanticism. Let’s not mention this conversation again.’ He put out his hand for me to shake, but he avoided my eye. ‘All our energy must be for our work.’

  I swallowed, not trusting myself to speak, hanging on to his hand.

  He looked at me at last, and surely there was a little shred of feeling in his glance? ‘I do understand, Gerty. But you must see that that was a moment which passed. You’re making such progress, you know – don’t give up.’

  *

  It was far too hot to make jam, but I had no choice; the fruit would not last more than a day. I left Nikita and returned to the kitchen. Like an automaton I plodded through my tasks while Sonya and Pasha joked and chattered, still in high spirits. Inside I shrivelled. I couldn’t believe my presumption, my idiotic stupidity. How could I have misunderstood Slavkin’s instruction to me so completely? I had taken even fewer steps down the road of transformation than I thought. I would have to be much, much harder on myself from now on. How difficult it must be for Nikita to deal with someone so stubborn – with such a servile personality. He had been perfectly clear, hadn’t he?

  In the evening Fyodor helped us seal the jars.

  ‘So how is your artistic development progressing, Fedya? Are we going to be treated to an art exhibition? Or a ballet?’ teased Pasha.

  Fyodor reddened a little, but did not speak.

  ‘A mime?’

  Suddenly I couldn’t bear it. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, leave him alone!’

  Pasha gazed at me for a moment, and then turned towards Fyodor. ‘Please don’t mind me, Fedya. I’m sorry if I upset you. I haven’t been given my task yet, but I can tell you already what it will be: to stop my idiotic joking and be serious. So forgive me for fitting in a few last bits of nonsense. I don’t mean to offend . . .’

  ‘No, no, I don’t take offence,’ Fyodor answered quietly. ‘I know you all think me pompous. It’s just that I’m no good at this sort of banter, you know – I never have been. As a child I was brought up alone, and my parents were always rather melancholy . . . I don’t see the point of taking up painting or sculpture; frankly, that would just be a waste of materials. But I do have one very meagre gift, which I’ve been working on a little this week’ – he looked embarrassed – ‘although you must forgive me if I am not terribly skilled . . .’ Fyodor glanced around at us, hesitating, and began to sing: ‘Alone I go out on to the road; the flinty path is sparkling with mist . . .’

  We stopped, electrified by his fine, sweet tenor voice. He sang all five verses of Lermontov’s poem, standing up straight like a little boy in the choir. Simple and unadorned, they seemed to express the essence of human isolation.

  When he finished, he just stood there, motionless. I turned away to hide my face; I was so moved.

  ‘Well,’ said Slavkin at last, beaming, delighted. ‘Now we see the whole Fedya. Wonderful! This is genuine progress.’

  ‘Fyodor, that’s beautiful,’ exclaimed Pasha.

  Fyodor was embarrassed and puffed his chest out in a particularly irritating way he had. ‘Yes, Nikita, you see I will do anything you ask of me, as best as I can. I don’t mind making myself look foolish for the sake of the commune. But . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re getting distracted from the real work? Frankly, these “self-improving” ideas are all very well, Slavkin, but singing isn’t going to make the factory wheels turn.’

  None of us was at all convinced by these remarks. Fyodor laughed in a pleased way when we begged him to sing something else. Later on, Nikita commented that we shouldn’t forget that our goal was to be transformed, that is to change form, not content – to change how we are, not who we are. ‘It’s very clear to me, if not to you, that all of you already possess the qualities of true communards. It’s just that some of them may have been obscured by the different priorities of the Old World.’

  I received these words of encouragement as if they were spoken only to me, drips of balm to my soul.

  9

  Autumn painted Moscow every shade of red, as though for a vast performance. ‘The streets are our brushes, the squares our palate,’ announced the poet Mayakovsky, who planned to revolutionise nature permanently by giving the trees in the Aleksandrovsky Gardens a coat of scarlet paint. Each day more avant-garde decorations appeared, plastered awkwardly over Moscow’s crumbling set. There was neither money nor materials for the radical changes the artists longed for, but here and there Constructivist monuments to Revolutionary heroes, hastily cast in concrete, went up. To educate the public, abstract art was hung out on the street, causing consternation: ‘They’ll be telling us to worship the devil next!’ wailed one old babushka at the sight of a Malevich. The vast head of Alexander III was toppled from his statue outside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and little children amused themselves by sliding down his nose.

  Everywhere, fluttering from every fence post, were slogans and tattered decrees:

  ‘Go to sleep quickly – your comrade needs your pillow!’

  ‘24 August. Nationalisation of Clothing – any person in possession of more than one overcoat to come and hand it in to their district Soviet, on pain of imprisonment.’

  ‘All ropes on church bells to be cut.’

  ‘Tax: On Hats – 30 roubles per item. On Pianos – 50 roubles. On Armchairs – 40 roubles.’

  ‘We must crush the Hydra of Counter-Revolution with Red Terror!’

  ‘Smash the Imperialist Bourgeoisie!’

  ‘Push the Bourgeoisie out of their nests!’

  Scribbled all over these official announcements were appeals for missing people: Valentina Yurievna Yukova, aged sixty-four; Oleg Borisov, aged six; Georgy Alexandrov, aged four.

  *

  Pasha’s account of his Revolutionary Development was really the story of his love affair with the avant-garde. He began with the lectures on Cézanne where he and Nikita had first met, then broke off and recited the poetry of Mayakovsky to us, leaping about with excitement. I couldn’t quite believe in Pasha’s commitment to the Revolution – his dandyism seemed to undermine it, his moustache that he couldn’t resist trimming and curling even when it could have got him beaten up on the street, his (to my mind) ridiculously affected Scottish accent when he spoke English; above all his constant, ironic commentary on life. Yet he was entirely serious about art and the theatre. He insisted on dragging us to the theatre several times a week, to dramatic groups in factories and hospitals, barracks and converted churches, to performances that never had props and often lacked scripts or plots.

  ‘Don’t you understand, Gerty, you Galliffet, here you can see the new world as it’s summoned into b
eing, one performance at a time.’

  I often just wished I could have stayed at home in Gagarinsky Lane, rather than in these large, draughty halls full of rowdy workers, who heckled and occasionally stormed the stage if they felt the villains weren’t getting their comeuppance quickly enough.

  Slavkin’s talks were more enjoyable, even though the Futurist revues in which he participated always ended in commotion. I remember one evening at the Café Pittoresk on Kuznetsky Bridge, decorated with abstract reliefs that jutted out from the walls and threatened to poke you in the eye. Slavkin’s lecture on the PropMash was followed by an act in which all the performers wore machine costumes made out of cardboard, eight or nine foot tall. They looked imposing but their voices were inaudible. After a while, tired of listening to muffled and incomprehensible fragments of poetry, the audience began to shout and throw things at the tiny stage.

  ‘Call yourselves men of the Future?’ yelled someone. ‘You’re not Futurists, you’re packets of biscuits!’

  He leapt up on the stage and took a swing at the tallest robot. The Futurists threw off their cardboard tubes and a brawl ensued.

  ‘You pineapple-munchers! You donkeys! You . . . you . . . talcum powder!’ the poets shouted, enjoying themselves.

  Through the crowd I suddenly caught sight of Emil Pelyagin, my student from the Hotel National. He looked out of place and panicky. I pushed my way through to him.

  ‘Comrade Pelyagin! What brings you here?’

  We had talked about the event, I remembered. Pelyagin was having three hours of lessons a week, spread over two days, during which we discussed all sorts of subjects – politics and history as well as our childhoods (both spent in small towns), the IRT and Slavkin’s inventions. I had become quite fond of him.

  He turned, and smiled – an awkward little closed-mouthed grimace – and immediately solemnised his face. ‘Comrade Freely,’ he said, with a bow. ‘Well, as a government official I try to keep myself abreast of developments in culture.’

  I felt myself blushing, ridiculously. ‘Well, it’s . . . it’s very kind of you to come. Would you like to meet Slavkin, now you’re here?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  I forced my way over to Slavkin, but Pelyagin was stuck behind a group of boys who were rather the worse for alcohol.

  ‘Oh, Nikita, my pupil wants to meet you – go and rescue him, won’t you?’ I gasped.

  Slavkin, a foot taller than anyone else, passed through the crowd with ease, occasionally lifting tussling boys out of his way. With an amiable smile he arrived at Pelyagin’s side. Slavkin spoke civilly to him. The episode, framed by the flailing arms, yells and yodels of the crowd, played out like a scene in a silent film. ‘No, no, I’m quite all right,’ I saw Pelyagin answer, pulling himself upright, craning his neck back to meet Slavkin’s eye. Slavkin put a hand on his shoulder to guide him through the mêlée. Pelyagin shook his hand off, a mulish look on his face. Slavkin tried again. Pelyagin shrugged him aside, quite violently this time.

  I tried to signal to Slavkin to leave him, but neither of them looked across at me. They were glaring at each other and I watched, with a sinking heart, as Slavkin took Pelyagin forcibly by the shoulders and propelled him across the room to me. I’m not sure his legs weren’t lifted off the ground.

  Before I could say anything Slavkin bundled Pelyagin out through the fire escape. I squeezed after them.

  Out on Tverskaya Street Pelyagin shook Slavkin off and brushed down his jacket.

  ‘Please forgive me, comrade, if I was mistaken,’ said Slavkin gravely. ‘Gerty asked me to come and help you. These days the kids do sometimes get carried away.’

  Pelyagin cleared his throat. ‘There was no need to manhandle me.’

  Slavkin shrugged.

  ‘Well, I’ll be on my way, Comrade Freely,’ said Pelyagin. He didn’t meet my eye.

  ‘Oh, won’t you wait a moment—’

  ‘Come on,’ Slavkin turned away brusquely. ‘Time for us to leave, Gerty.’

  Pelyagin spun on his heel and departed. At our next lesson, I apologised, tentatively, for the unfortunate misunderstanding and Pelyagin brushed it off. ‘Don’t give it a thought.’

  In the years since I have probably wasted not just hours, but whole days wondering about this episode, and even so I still can’t work out if it had any bearing on the course of events.

  *

  The commune gained two new members that month: Ivan Matryossin and his wife Nina, dancers who had recently arrived in Moscow from Kiev. Pasha discovered them sleeping in a corridor at his office and brought them back to live with us, claiming they couldn’t be closer to the IRT philosophy. What this turned out to mean was that they couldn’t have been closer to his philosophy, both avant-gardists through and through. Ivan and Nina showed no interest in communal living, missing our evening meetings due to their performances, refusing to collectivise their clothes, and living the life of a perfectly ordinary married couple in the night nursery, where – worst of all crimes – they hoarded food. Fyodor agitated to expel them, but it became quickly apparent to the rest of us that Ivan and Nina had something extraordinary to offer the commune. This was the Model T.

  In Kiev they had spent a year working on a new type of eurhythmics, which they called the Model T system (for telo, body). It had two aims: firstly, healthy physical exertion, which they claimed exercised not only the muscles but the internal organs, the immune and nervous systems; and secondly, psychological training in ‘the rational and optimistic rhythms of the future’. With the efficiency of a Ford production line, we would be trained up physically and psychologically for Communism. The movements, many of which were quite beyond me, had names such as ‘Tearing out the Bourgeois Liver’, ‘The Power of the Turtle’, ‘The Gulls of the Soul’. They were accompanied by sounds, from a growl that came from the Turtle to the abundant flatulence that Nina produced when performing the movement to cleanse the bowels. She assured us that it would not take long, if we practised regularly, before we too would learn the same skilful control of the body.

  To my surprise the Model T was an instant success, for Nina’s confident direction somehow released us all, even me, from inhibition. We spent those warm September evenings in the Summer Gardens twisting and stretching our bodies in time with her, mooing and whinnying with abandon. Groups of children might run to watch us, shouting, ‘Here come the grunters!’, but an hour of Model T left me strangely dizzy with happiness, loose-limbed as a drunkard. Afterwards we would stroll through the park, kicking the drifts of leaves, full of hilarity and nonsense. It worked better, even, than the banya. Bad temper, resentment, unhappiness – not to mention hunger and weariness – floated from us. That night I would sleep quite still, without waking or turning about, and wake with a smile on my face. The giggling children were nothing compared with the blissful calm of that sleep.

  This was all the more useful for, as the first thrill of the commune faded, tense moments seemed to arise between us more and more frequently. These were never, needless to say, about politics, or morals, but usually over some idiotic detail. One evening Fyodor accused Sonya of having eaten a hundred grammes of her bread ration on the way home, driving her to tears, at which Pasha swore at Fyodor so inventively that Fyodor threatened to move out. Another time Vera and I fell out over how long she took to do the ironing. These were nothing, however, compared to the incident between Dr Marina and Volodya.

  There had never been much love between the two of them; he thought her stuck up, while she detested his swearing, spitting and general air of undiluted muzhik. There was already a tension in the air when she raised the subject of the Shop Without a Clerk, from which stock had been disappearing without being noted down.

  ‘And I can’t help wondering why four bars of soap would have been necessary to anyone; I checked all the washbasins in the house, and each of them has soap.’

  There was a pause. Nikita looked around. ‘Now is the time for anyone to speak up. We are living
in trust; if someone had a reason to take more soap, tell us, and we’ll try to understand.’

  ‘Well—’ Volodya started.

  ‘I thought so,’ snapped Dr Marina instantly. ‘You traded it for cigarettes, yes? For tobacco?’

  Volodya glared at her. ‘Oh, so you’d made up your mind about me already? What, I was stealing soap from all of us to keep myself in fags? Well done, Doctor, very trusting.’

  Nikita held up a hand silently.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dr Marina muttered.

  ‘You’ll never change, will you?’ Volodya paid no attention. ‘Looking down at me, Marina Getler, that’s all you’ve ever done, you bloody bourgeoise . . .’

  Slavkin just said, ‘Volodya.’

  Volodya took a breath and visibly tried to control himself. ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I did with the soap.’

  Dr Marina took a sharp intake of breath –

  ‘I’ll tell you: I took it to barter for a barrel of sunflower oil, best quality. Someone offered it to me down at the railway station, he’d heard I had soap.’

  – and let out a shriek. ‘You took it to barter, without consulting the rest of us! Haven’t you understood anything about how we are trying to run the IRT? You stupid, ignorant—’

  ‘Enough,’ interposed Slavkin, but they were beyond reining themselves in now, both on their feet, shouting at each other.

  ‘It was for the commune, you nagging old cow, don’t you see? A whole barrel! I didn’t have time to consult with your ladyship—’

  ‘You brute, you take us for fools – you’d take advantage of all of us given the chance, just to satisfy your disgusting libidinous self-indulgence, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You stupid bitch, what are you talking about now?’ yelled Volodya.

  ‘You’re using the Revolution as an excuse to exploit a gentle soul—’

  ‘Stop.’ Slavkin was on his feet between the two of them. ‘Quiet – don’t speak.’

  Volodya, leaning towards him like a bull ready to charge, was breathing heavily. He could have snapped Nikita in two; I marvelled at Nikita’s calmness, his strength.