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was displaced and business as usual discarded he felt at home amid
the chaos and flux . Joyously Mayakovsky summoned the futurists ,
"the drummers and the poets," into the street. He celebrated the
"second tidal flood" in the powerful staccato of "Our March," a rare
instance of nearly nonobjective political poetry where bursts of
released consonantal energy provide an auditory correlative for
revolutionary euphoria. He sang the imminent world revolution in a
satirical morality play, "Mystery-Bouffe," and an exuberant com–
munist epic, "A Hundred Fifty Million."
As the excitement of "ten days that shook the world" gave way
to grimy slugging, Mayakovsky persisted in his total commitment. No
propagandist chore was too menial for him . He wrote marches and
versified slogans and early Soviet commercials which , owing to his
verbal inventiveness and wit, were often more effective than many
more ambitious efforts of
engage
Soviet poets. He produced
thousands of posters and captions which derided the opponents'
regime and eulogized Soviet institutions , including the dread
Cheka. He debunked any poetry that was not immediately useful,
saying, "In our day only he's a poet who will write a march and a
slogan."
At times his eagerness to serve occasioned such lines as these,
written in 1925, "I want the Gosplan [The State Economic Planning
Commission
1
to sweat in debate assigning me goals a year ahead ...
I want the pen to be on the par with the bayonet and Stalin to deliver
his Politburo reports about verse in the making as he would about
pig iron and the smelting of steel."
Such poetry can be interpreted in more than one way . Was
Mayakovsky affirming the importance of poetry in the only
language which Russia's iron age could understand - that of technol–
ogy and political expediency? Or was this rather another expression
of the futurist iconoclast's urge to depoeticize poetry? Perhaps. Yet
the spectacle of an erstwhile impudent, bohemian artist asking the
Party for guidance is a disturbing one. Let me note that this stance
was part of a larger irony: the neofuturist group, Left Front of the
Arts (LEF), of which Mayakovsky was one of the leading members,
contrived to combine a spirited defense of avant garde values with
blatant political instrumentalism. Most Western discussions of this
embattled faction tend t9 emphasize the former rather than the
latter. There is no denying that the LEF spokesmen waged a brave,
indeed a vehement, campaign against the aesthetic neoconservatism
of the cultural bureaucrats. But it is equally true that in their
