ILYA
EHRENBURS
nouncing lyricism, Mayakovsky wrote his "About
This."u
It
was
not understood even by the people close to
him,
and was run down
by both his allies and
his
enemies
in
literature, but nevertheless it
enriched Russian poetry.
As
the years went by, he relented in his renunciation of the
art
of the past. At the end of 1928, New LEF reported that Mayakov–
sky had stated publicly, "I pardon Rembrandt." I will remind
readers once again that he died young. He lived, thought, felt and
wrote in his own way-he was above all a poet. I remember the
enthusiasm with which he spoke of the new industrial beauty of
America
in
those distant years when the electrification of our
country was still only an idea, when on the dark, snowbound The–
ater Square lamps shone with the sign: "Children are the flowers
of life." I met him when he came back from America. Yes, Brook–
lyn Bridge is a great thing, of course, and they've got so many
machines over there. But how barbarous and inhuman it is! He
cursed and said how pleased he had been to see the tiny gardens of
Normandy. LEF's program assumed rejection of Paris-where every
house is a broken fragment of the past- and glorification of the
ultramodern industrialized America. But Mayakovsky damned
America, and not ashamed of seeming sentimental, declared his
love for Paris. What is the reason for this contradiction? LEF lasted
only a few years, while Mayakovsky was a great poet. In his pro–
grammatic verse he scoffed at the admirers of Pushkin and people
who visited the Louvre, but he was also enchanted by lines from
Onegin and by old paintings.
He realized right away that the October Revolution had
changed the course of history; yet he saw the details of the future
schematically, like a poster rather than a painting. Nowadays we
would hardly be attracted by the hygienic idyll of the last act of
The Bedbug.
To Mayakovsky the art of the past seemed not so
much alien as doomed. His iconoclasm was like a taking of the
vows---"a feat of self-denial."25 He waged war not only against
various critics and against the authors of sentimental ballads, but
24. A long, lyrical poem, with suicidal overtones, in which Mayakovsky
despairs of the infidelity of his mistress.
25. podoig.
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