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ILYA
EHRENBUR6
to a crowd in Theater Square. I looked at the awful wallpaper
and
smiled. Boot-tops were indeed becoming harps.
Mayakovsky amazed me. He somehow combined poetry
with
revolution, and turbulent streets of Moscow with that modem art
which the habitues of the Rotonde dreamed of. I even felt that
be
could help me find the right path. It turned out differently: Maya.
kovsky was for me a tremendous event in poetry and in the life 01
our century, but he had absolutely no direct effect upon me,
re–
maining close and yet infinitely distant at the same time.
This may be the mark of genius, or
it
may have been
simp~
Mayakovsky's character. He used to say that poets ought to be
"dif·
ferent," and was himself the sponsor of LEF, New LEF
and
REPS; he wanted to enlist the support of many people and bring
I
them together, but the only people around him were his
followe~
and sometimes his epigones. He told me how he used to talk to
the
sun at his country house near Moscow/ but he was himself a sun,
around which his satellites orbited.
I met him in Moscow in 1918 and 1920, in Berlin in 1922,
in
Paris, and again in Moscow, and then again in Paris (the last
time
we saw each other was
in
the spring of 1929, a year before
his
death). Sometimes our encounters were fleeting, and sometimes ,
long and significant. I would like to say something of what I think
of Mayakovsky; I know that this will be one-sided and subjective, '
but can the testimony of a contemporary be otherwise? It is
easy
to recreate an image of a man from a great number of different
and
sometimes contradictory accounts. The trouble is that Mayakovsky,
though a passionate destroyer of various myths, himself became
a
mythical hero with extraordinary rapidity.
It
is as though he were
fated to become something different from what he was. There
an:
eye-witnesses who have recorded some of his savage jokes. There
3. Mayakovsky's "ultra-revolutionary" literary organizations which fought
for the introduction of Mayakovsky's style, derived from futurism, as
the one style adequate for the epoch of technology. New LEF (Left
Front) and REF (Revolutionary Front) made some concessions to in–
creasing conformism demanded by RAPP. In 1929, Mayakovsky left
REF and announced his adherence to RAPP.
4. The subject of a famous Mayakovsky poem, "An Extraordinary Adven–
ture."
