33b
MAX HAYWARD
Revolution.
m
Of
Mystery Boutte
the same writer said that it
still contains "strong echoes of the problems which exercised
Mayakovsky in the pre-revolutionary period: abstract man and
the socialist paradise." Despite all his flamboyant self-identifica–
tion with the cause, it was only Stalin's off-handed canonization
of him in 1935 which led to the creation of "proletarian" cre–
dentials for him and his enthronement as the great tribune and
drum-beater of the Revolution. This he certainly was in his own
estimation, but he understood the true nature of the Revolution
scarcely better than Blok or Esenin. The result was tragedy for
all three of them and their last days, in the words of Pushkin's
poem, were "without divinity, without inspiration, without tears,
without life and without love." Blok was the first to realize
his
mistake. When he died in 1921 he was already deaf to the
"music of the Revolution" which only three years earlier had
inspired him to write the first and greatest poem of the Soviet
era. The unspeakable agony of his disillusionment is conveyed
by Zoshchenko's portrait of him in
Before Sunrise.
For Esenin, who committed suicide in 1925, the years of
disabusement were more productive. Unlike Blok he was able to
rescue something from the wreck of his dreams and transmute
his
disenchantment into poetry, which perhaps better than anything
else expresses the tragic alienation of the Russian intelligentsia
in the 'twenties. Quickly understanding that October would not,
as he had fondly imagined, usher in a peasant paradise of which
he would be the prophet, he reconciled himself with gentle sub–
missiveness to the role of a stranger in his own land. He was not
against the new way of things, but he could not be a part of it.
In a poem written in 1920, he drew a picture of a poor little
foal pathetically trying to race a steam-engine; the image well
expressed his belated recognition that October meant the advent
of a harsh and ruthless machine age which would have no use for
his "gentle songs." In "Soviet Russia," written shortly before
his
1. N. Plisko,
Literaturnaya Entsiklopedia.
