PEOPLE; YEARS AND LIFE
509
I have repeated Pushkin's verse to myself and lovingly recalled the
old Italian masters. When first arriving in Moscow, almost the first
thing I did was to race to the Kremlin. I was staggered by fifteenth–
century painting; until then I had no idea of the Russian renais–
sance.
Arguments about the values of the past soon died down. Maya–
kovsky wrote a poem about Pushkin and materials on Mayakovsky
have now been published in the Academy of Sciences "Literary
Heritage" series.
so
(I have already mentioned the magazine
The
Thing;
among its staff members were many representatives of our
"Ieft-wing-art"-Mayakovsky, Malevich, Meyerhold, Tatlin, and
Rodchenko. In an article on the aims of the magazine I wrote: "It
is now ridiculous and naive 'to throw Pushkin overboard.' There is
a continuity in form and classical examples have no terrors for the
modern masters. We can learn from Pushkin and Poussin ...
The
Thing
does not deny the past in the past, but calls for the modern
in the modern....")
Mayakovsky is not a difficult poet: his poems were always met
with roars of laughter. Before the revolution people used to make
fun of the pictures of the futurist artists (Malevich, Tatlin, Rod–
chenko, Puni, U daltsova, Popova and Altman). After October the
epigones of classical poetry and art began to pack their bags. Both
Bunin and Repin went abroad. The futurists, cubists and suprema–
tists stayed behind. Like their Western counterparts, and the pre·
war habitues of the Rotonde, they hated bou:·geois society and
saw the way out in revolution.
The futurists decided that people's tastes could be changed just
as rapidly as the economic structure of society. The magazine
The
Art of the Commune
wrote: "We definitely lay claim, and would
probably not refuse
if
allowed, to use the power of the state to put
our ideas of art into practice." This was of course more of a dream
than a threat. The Moscow streets were decked with suprematists
and cubists mainly because the academically-minded artists were in
the opposition (political not artistic). The results were nevertheless
30. The volume on Mayakovsky, published in 1958, which contains, among
other biographical materials, some of his love letters, was soon with·
drawn from sale and its editors accl:1sed of "defamation."
