by Gary Lachman
Realizing there was nowhere to turn, Witkacy decided to end his life. Czeslawa’s diary recounts that they went to the woods, and sat down under an oak. Witkacy then began to take ephedrine tablets, his experience with drugs being put to a grisly use. He intended to slash his wrist, and the ephedrine would help his blood flow faster. Czeslawa was determined to join him, and the two drank a mixture of luminal and cybalgine, then said goodbye. Witkacy slit his wrist but, like Seneca’s, the blood didn’t flow. He then tried a varicose vein in his leg, but this also didn’t work. As Czeslawa began to drift off, Witkacy told her to wake up, and to not leave him alone. He then thought better of it and said, “Once you fall asleep, I’ll cut my throat.” He told her the name of the vein he intended to cut, and that if “you knew how to do it right, everything would go smoothly” – which suggests that he had done some research on the matter. When Czeslawa woke the next morning, Witkacy’s body was lying next to her; she said his face had a look of relief, “a relaxing after a great fatigue.” Ironically, she was seeing double and once again Witkacy’s Doppelgänger had made an appearance. After feeble attempts to bury Witkacy, hampered by her semi-consciousness, Czeslawa gave up. She was discovered, along with Witkacy’s body, the next day.
*
Both Benjamin and Witkacy were destroyed by the totalitarian regimes they tried to escape, in Benjamin’s case the Nazis, in Witkacy’s both the Nazis and the Soviets. The case of the Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky differs from both in that his suicide was brought on at least in part by a regime he embraced and had even helped to put into power. Supplementing his own self-destructive tendencies with revolutionary fervour, Mayakovsky’s tragedy is that he was an example of the successful revolution’s first rule of thumb: eradicate all other revolutionaries.
Like Witkacy, Mayakovsky had a flair for the theatrical, a personality trait that began at birth: he was born on his father’s birthday, 7 July 1893, something that delighted the family and seemed to mark him for some special destiny. Vladimir’s father was a hard working, good humoured forest ranger, a man who loved children and animals. He was a large man with a booming voice, and Mayakovsky inherited both of these characteristics from him. It’s possible that he also inherited something less welcome from his father. Just before Vladimir’s thirteenth birthday, his father died suddenly of septicaemia, from a pin prick on his finger that had become infected, and it’s believed that Mayakovsky’s later hypochondria and extreme fastidiousness stemmed from this incident; like Witkacy, Mayakovsky developed a compulsion about hand washing. From an early age, Mayakovsky had been separated from his father and siblings because of a lack of schools in their remote home village of Bagdadi (now renamed Mayakovski) in Georgia, near the town of Kutaisi; Vladimir had to be sent elsewhere for his education, while his father remained in the forest. The possibility of living together as a family again seemed imminent when the tragedy struck, and one outcome was that Mayakovsky was now the only male in the family (he had two sisters) and the responsibilities that accompanied this weighed on him. The family’s financial prospects looked bleak; given that his father died before he had reached fifty, his dependents weren’t entitled to a full pension, and they were faced with having to support themselves on ten roubles a month. It’s from this time that “the famous Mayakovsky frown” first appeared. If photographs of Witkacy give the impression of an almost infinitely pliable face, Mayakovksy presents the polar opposite. As A.D. P. Briggs remarks, “Almost every adult photograph shows the poet with a severe expression, looking defensive, embarrassed, hostile, annoyed or merely preoccupied, but always serious minded and unrelaxed. […] It was after the death of his father that Mayakovsky, otherwise a manly and handsome figure, first adopted the look of unremitting moroseness by which he is now known.”43
Like most poets, Mayakovsky was precocious. He taught himself to read at an early age, enjoyed playing word games and displayed a remarkable memory; he was often asked by his father to recite some of his favourite poems. These performances were characterized by a strong sense of rhyme and rhythm, characteristics that would become a part of Mayakovsky’s later popular readings. Being the son of a forest ranger might suggest that Vladimir was predestined to be a nature poet, but something happened at the age of seven that led to very different results. Accompanying his father on his rounds, they came across a rivet factory in a ravine. Vladimir was astounded by the electric lights illuminating the site. For the young boy it seemed that night had been banished and daylight was now available on demand. Man had improved on nature and was no longer its slave; machines, not nature, captured his imagination. A later incident cemented Mayakovsky’s growing passion for the modern. In school, a large portion of the tsarist curriculum involved readings from the scriptures, and Mayakovsky was surreptitiously tested on his biblical acumen by being asked the meaning of the word oko, an archaic Church Slavonic equivalent of the modern Russia word for ‘eye’, glaz. In Georgian, however, it means ‘pound’ and this is what Vladimir answered. The incident stuck with him, and in an autobiographical sketch he remarked, “So I immediately detested everything ancient, everything churchy, and everything Slavonic. Perhaps that was where my Futurism, my atheism and my internationalism came from.”44 Although resolutely anti-church and anti-religion, Mayakovsky’s poetry is full of references to God, some of them eerily prescient; in his poem “Man,” he ascends to heaven, where he soon becomes bored and returns to earth, only to discover that a thousand years earlier he had shot himself.
Mayakovsky’s rejection of everything ancient was given another prod in 1905 when Vladimir became involved in revolutionary activities. In Kutaisi, where he was going to school and living with his mother, Mayakovsky was infected with the revolutionary spirit; he took to reading subversive literature and attending underground anti-tsarist discussion groups, happy to be accepted as an equal by the older boys and adults. He passed around leaflets, put up posters and enjoyed singing the Marseillaise. The posters and leaflets had a pro-found effect, as many of them combined politics and poetry, something that Mayakovsky would soon do himself.
A few months after his father’s death, his mother borrowed money from friends and moved the family to Moscow. Here they didn’t escape poverty, but at least they were together – Vladimir’s sister Lyudmila had been studying there already. Mayakovsky’s struggle to survive strengthened his solidarity with the poor and quickened his disgust with the old regime. He was ecstatic about the move. Everything about the big city enchanted him; compared to the trams, cinemas, huge buildings and electric lights, nature was boring and slow, an appreciation forgotten by today’s ‘back to nature’ sensibility. Mayakovsky met more revolutionary types and his increasing commitment to a new regime was validated by getting himself arrested three times, once for participating in a prison break, in which his whole family took part; his sisters and mother shared his anti-tsarist sentiments. Although only fifteen, he spent several months in jail, part of this in solitary confinement, and the experience affected him deeply. For one thing it effectively ended his career as a revolutionary activist: he was now known to the police and as a marked man was of no use to the underground. The loneliness and insecurity of a prison cell would haunt him in later years, yet his experience behind bars also suggested that there might be better ways of dragging Mother Russia into the modern world.
One benefit was that in prison he had the leisure to devote himself to reading. As a boy he exhibited a talent for art and while behind bars he was allowed to paint, read and write as he desired. He read the Symbolists Andrei Bely and Valery Briusov, but wasn’t impressed. He then tackled ‘world classics’ like Shakespeare and Byron. He was halfway through Anna Karenina when he was released, and never bothered to finish it. Mayakovsky’s attitude toward literary ‘greats’ is summed up in his remark that he had “no idea how the Karenin business turned out.” Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and the rest were part of the corrupt old world and he had come to do away with all that.
Ma
yakovsky’s ‘futurism’ received its final confirmation at Moscow’s School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he met an older student to whom he took an immediate dislike. David Burlyuk was eleven years Mayakovsky’s senior, and in some ways he was Jacques Vaché to Mayakovsky’s Breton. Mayakovsky restrained his headstrong personality in order to benefit from his lessons, exhibiting a talent for self-subduing that would later prove a kind of suicide in itself. Burlyuk had no such inhibitions: he was a dandy who wore pretentious frock-coats and lorgnettes and sang to himself as he walked. Mutual disregard blossomed into inevitable friendship when the two discovered each other walking out of a Rachmaninov concert, bored to tears. Laughing, they spent the rest of the evening discussing how tedious everything in the art, literature and music of the time was and how it was up to them to do something about it.
Like the Dadaists, Italian Futurists, Surrealists and many other aesthetic movements of the early twentieth century, the Russian Futurists rejected practically everything that came before them, although perhaps because of the Russian temperament, which is given to exaggeration, they did so with a peculiar vehemence. The Russian Futurists – which, along with Mayakovsky and Burlyuk (who was more of an impresario and promoter than an artist) included the poets Vassily Kamensky and Velimir Khlebnikov – did their best to draw attention to themselves by dressing outlandishly and making outrageous statements. They wore spoons in their button holes, painted on their faces, and gave poetry readings with a grand piano suspended over their heads. Burlyuk once hired fifty young boys to run through the street shouting, “The Futurists are coming.” (Along with Tristan Tzara, Dali and, much later, Andy Warhol, Burlyuk understood that modern art was as much about publicity as it was about the art itself.) Mayakovsky himself stood out in his famous yellow blouse (made by his mother), green overcoat and top hat, over six feet tall and booming challenges like, “The past suffocates us. The Academy and Pushkin are more incomprehensible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc. overboard from the steamship of modernity.” One gets an idea of their aesthetic programme from the title of an early anthology of Futurist poetry, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.
Mayakovsky is one of the most vain modern poets; the personal pronoun “I” appears almost relentlessly in his poetry, and perhaps his best known poem, “A Cloud in Trousers,” contains lines like “Glorify me!/ I’m beyond comparison with the great/ I above every created thing place nihil.” An early work of this time, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, in which Mayakovsky portrays himself as a creature of supreme integrity and loftiness, gives an idea of what was in store for him. It’s full of posturing and hunger for attention, but it also suggests loneliness and self-pity, as well as suicidal feelings: at one point he tells the reader that he will lay down on a railroad track, and “the wheel of the locomotive will embrace my neck.”. One biographer called the work “a celebration of his genius as a poet, and the apotheosis of the Poet offering himself as a sacrifice for the sufferings of all mankind.”45
Unlike Benjamin and Witkacy, Mayakovsky quickly enjoyed what many writers desire: early success. Yet it came with the usual price. In St. Petersburg he gave a reading at the infamous Stray Dog Café; the applause was loud and gratifying and a journalist for Theatre Review wrote of a “Mr. Mayakovsky who read several of his poems in which the audience immediately sensed a great genuine gift of poetry.”46 Future reviewers agreed. Although the Futurists were often incomprehensible, and generally provoked their audiences, Mayakovsky had a knack of speaking directly to his listeners, and the stentorian voice and powerful frame made an immediate impression. He quickly became something of a celebrity, his good looks and evident strength easily attracting women. But the attention soon turned into a habit, and when he didn’t receive it, he grew petulant. His brief affairs were also less than satisfying. As with Witkacy, there were two Mayakovskys: one loud, aggressive, and boorish, demanding attention and often being insulting when he got it; the other a sensitive, lonely, insecure young man, who adopted his swaggering pose as a kind of protective colouring. Childhood feelings of being unloved – brought on, no doubt, by the long separations – and memories of his months in prison, added to his emotional confusion. Mayakovsky’s hunger for love was abated for a time by meeting Elsa Brik, who later married the Surrealist Louis Aragon. The two became lovers, but it was Lili Brik, Elsa’s sister, who became the love of Mayakovsky’s life. Lili was married to an older man, the scholar and critic Osip Brik, but this didn’t stop her and Mayakovsky from becoming lovers. Osip Brik evidently had a very modern outlook on relationships; for the rest of Mayakovksy’s life, the three lived in an on-again, off-again ménage à trois. Brik also became Mayakovsky’s publisher.
Yet even his love for Lili Brik didn’t provide emotional security. In a poem inspired by, written for and first read to her, “The Backbone Flute,” Mayakovsky exhibits an attraction to suicide that will turn up more frequently in later poems. “More and more often I think” he writes, “Wouldn’t it perhaps be best/To put the full-stop of a bullet/At the end of me?/Today I – just in case – am giving my farewell concert.” (Later, in “Man,” already mentioned, Mayakovsky cries, “Chemist let me take/My soul/With no pain/Out into infinite space,” but is denied extinction and must suffer a kind of Christ-like fate.)
With the outbreak of WWI, Mayakovsky volunteered for service, even though as the only male in his family he was exempt. His political youth, however, branded him ‘unreliable’, and he spent the war years as a draughtsman for the Petrograd Military Automobile School. Then came the revolution, and Mayakovsky threw himself into it body and soul. He wrote poems supporting the Bolsheviks and worked for ROSTA, the Russian Telegraph Agency, where he designed pro-communist posters, wrote propaganda, political verse, children’s poetry, plays and organized events and agitprop ‘happenings’, drawing on his experience as a Futurist. Most of his avant-garde companions didn’t make the transition so smoothly; many had fled, some were silenced or suffered tragic fates, like Mayakovsky’s fellow poet Velimir Khlebnikov, who starved to death while wandering the country, famously sleeping on a pillowcase stuffed with his manuscripts. Lenin and the Bolsheviks disliked modern art in general and Futurism in particular; the only future they had in mind was one in which they called the shots, and artists like Kandinsky and Chagall quickly got the message and left for Europe. Mayakovsky, however, believed in the revolution and would cut his cloth to suit its needs. He would soon jettison the egoism of his early work and convince himself that true poetry must serve the needs of the state. In a kind of psychological suicide he “changed his own character,” and agreed with the Bolsheviks that “this was no time for individualism or for writing pieces which could be called unintelligible,” so “he ruthlessly suppressed those tendencies within himself and gave his all to the young state.” In Mayakovsky’s own words, “I mastered myself/Stepping on the throat of my own song,” lines, ironically, from a poem called “At the Top of My Voice.”
But for a brief while, it seemed that political and poetic revolutions could work hand in hand. In 1922, Mayakovsky travelled to Berlin and Paris, and met with poets, artists and fellow travellers, among them Picasso and Leger. Returning to Russia, with Osip Brik he started two magazines, LEF and the New LEF; the idea was to corral all the Futurists, Formalists, Constructivists and other ‘new’ movements into a single cultural front, the Left Front of Art. It seemed that, as the Surrealists would try to do in the next decade, the forces of modernism could serve the aims of the new proletariat regime. But this honeymoon would be brief, and neither magazine lasted long; ironically, one of their main theoretical positions was that a proletarian society had no need of poetry – at the same time as Mayakovsky was filling its pages with the stuff. During this time Mayakovsky made a film adaptation of Jack London’s Martin Edin, whose hero commits suicide. Called Not Born For Money, Mayakovsky played the lead. In it, he fakes a suicide to escape a false life, and becomes a worker. A gun used in the f
ilm would appear again later on in his life, sadly as something more than a prop.
Working in Lunacharsky’s ministry, Mayakovsky became the poet of the revolution, but even with this official imprimatur, his position was always tentative. In 1924 he composed an elegy on the death of Lenin, which made him famous throughout Russia. He travelled again, this time to the United States, Mexico and Cuba – his popularity, as well as Osip Brik’s connections, granted Mayakovsky extraordinary liberties, and no doubt the Bolsheviks saw the advantages of sending their premiere poet on a public relations jaunt. His relations with Lili Brik began to break down – he had fathered a child in Paris and was in love with a much younger woman, and she also took other lovers – but when he heard of the suicide of the poet Sergei Yesenin, he criticised him for his narcissism. Yesenin, a popular poet, who was married for a time to Isadora Duncan, was an alcoholic and drug addict; in 1925 he slashed his wrists in a Leningrad hotel, wrote farewell poems with his blood, then hanged himself. Yesenin’s last poem ended with the lines, “In this life, there’s nothing new about dying/ But, of course, there’s nothing newer about living.” Mayakovsky wrote a rebuttal, changing Yesenin’s last words: “In this life/ There’s nothing hard about dying -/ To make a life/ Is considerably harder.”
Yet, Mayakovsky, who seemed on top of the world, was not long to follow. Even though he forced his poetry to toe the party line, in the atmosphere of the late 1920s, he fell increasingly under scrutiny, and his work was criticized as being still too ‘formal’ and ‘unintelligible’ for the common man. Party hacks accused him of individualism, self-glorification and insincerity. His play The Bedbug was heavily criticized, and another, The Bathhouse, was a flop; this was understandable, as both were satires on the new ruling elite. Mayakovsky’s problem was that he was unable to stop being revolutionary, and this was dangerous, especially after the revolution had finally inaugurated the new dictatorship of the proletariat. The party could use him, but once it had achieved its goal, he had to fall in line, like everyone else. No matter how much he tried to do this, Mayakovksy was too intelligent and honest not to recognize that the ‘revolution’ he had helped to make a reality, had only changed one set of masters for another. That he had prostituted his genius to hacks with a fraction of his talent, for whatever noble cause, could not have escaped him.