S08
ILYA EHRENBURS
rhombuses, and faces with triangles instead oj eyes spotted the
peel.
ing facades of colonnaded Empire mansions. (The ar.t which is now
called "abstract" and is much discussed both here and in the West,
~as
at that time served up to Soviet citizens in unlimited quanti.
ties.) That year, May Day coincided with Good Friday. Worship–
pers thronged the street near the chapel of the Iberian Virgin.
Trucks which had once belonged to the Stupin Company drove
by
draped with abstract canvasses. Actors on the trucks were perform.
ing various scenes such as "The Exploits of Stepan Khalturin" or
the "Paris Commune." An old woman, looking at a cubist painting
with an enormous fish eye, was wailing "They want us to pray to
the devil. . . ."
I laughed, but my laughter was cheerless.
I have just reread an article I wrote in the summer of
1918
for the paper
Monday
entitled "Among the Cubists." In it I talked
about Picasso, Leger and Rivera. I said that the works of these
artists could
be
regarded either as "lunatic decorations of a house
about to collapse, or as the foundation of a new structure, hitherto
Undreamed-of even in the dreams of artists."
It's no accident, of course, that Picasso, Leger and Rivera
became communists. It was not the academically-inclined artists,
but the futurists, cubists and suprematists who were on Red Square
I
in
1918.
What was it that disturbed me about the triumph of these
artists and poets, who reminded me (though only outwardly) of
the
greatest friends of my early youth?
Above all, it was their attitude to the art of the past. Everyone
knows that Mayakovsky developed and changed, but remained at
the same time a passionate iconoclast: "You find a White Guardist,
and put him against the wall. But what about Raphael? What about
Rastrelli?29 It's high time that bullets spatter the walls of museums.
Shoot up that old rubbish through the maws of lOO-inch guns. Deaf
I
to White Guard blandishments, you've mounted your guns at the
edge of the forest. And why isn't Pushkin taken by storm?" I could
(l
not understand this. Often, wandering along the streets of Moscow,
29. Count Bartolommeo RastrelJi, the Italian-born Rococo architect who
designed most of St. Petersburg's palaces and government buildings duro
ing the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna.
