PEOPLE, YEARS AND LIFE
497
are the school textbooks. And last but not least there is his statue.
There is the teenager who learns bits from "Good!" by rote and
there is the housewife in the streetcar who asks anxiously: "Are
you getting off at Mayakovsky?" How difficult it is to speak about
people....
Until the mid-'thirties, Mayakovsky was the subject of passion–
ate argument. Whenever his name was mentioned at the First Con–
gress of Soviet Writers,5 some applauded wildly while others were
silent. At the time I wrote in
Izvestia:
"We did not applaud
be–
cause somebodt wanted to canonize Mayakovsky-we applauded
because for us Mayakovsky's name stood for the rejection of all
literary canons." I could never have imagined that a year later
Mayakovsky would actually
be
canonized. I did not go to his fun–
eral. Friends tell me that the coffin was too short. It seems to me
that in fact it was Mayakovsky's posthumous glory which was not
only too short, but more important, too constricting.
I want first of all to talk about the man. He was by no means
a "monolith"; he was huge and complicated, with tremendous will–
power, and a bundle of sometimes contradictory sensations.
Anna Segers
1
called her novel
The Dead Are Always Young.
First impressions are almost always eclipsed by later ones. In this
book I have tried to talk about the young Alexei Tolstoy, who was
one of the first writers I ever met. But often when thinking of him
I see a corpulent man, with his fame, with his loud laughter and
tired eyes-just as he was in the last years of his life. Then I look
at a photograph-standing next to Mayakovsky is Alexander Fade–
yev, young and dreamy, with tender eyes. I find it very difficult to
remember Fadeyev in this way. Now I see those cold eyes, full of
self will. ...
8
But Mayakovsky remains young in my memory.
5. 1934.
6. That "somebody" was to be Stalin who proclaimed in 1935 that "Maya–
kovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet
epoch. Indifference to his memory and to his work is a crime."
7. A leading and notoriously conformist East German writer.
8. Fadeyev, who committed suicide in 1956, was Secretary of the Union
of Soviet Writers during the worst post-war years before Stalin's death,
and as such was responsible for the most savage of the literary purges
following Zhdanov's denunciations in 1946.
