VICTOR ERLICH
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eagerness to subordinate literature and art to the exigencies of Soviet
propaganda, they sided time and again with the bleak proletarian
"zealots" rather than with the open-minded, if not always sophisti–
cated, interpreters of Marxist doctrine. Thus a movement launched
to the accompaniment of loud claims to the total autonomy and self–
reference of poetic language was now serving as one of the vehicles of
the relentless politicization of Soviet culture, which ultimately proved
destructive to all creative impulse.
In the meantime, Mayakovsky's self-imposed bondage to a
mythicized future was taking a heavy toll on both the man and the
poet. By the middle of the twenties, the ebullience of "Our March"
had yielded to profound weariness - an "amortization of the heart
and soul," in Mayakovsky's words - and occasional exasperation
with the ever-receding millennium:
And when the sun like a fattened hog
will rise over the future without beggars and cripples
I will be rotting under a fence
along with a dozen of my colleagues.
In 1930 Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart. His
suicide marked the end of an era.
It
signaled the collapse of an in–
creasingly precarious alliance between the regime ushered in by the
Russian Revolution and the Russian artistic avant garde. While in
architecture constructivism was granted a few more years of grace,
in literature, painting, and criticism, formal innovation and the
modernist quest were arrested by a bureaucratic fiat.
As for Mayakovsky, the causes of his self-destructive act appear
to lie deeper than in mere political disenchantment. What was at
issue, I believe, was a sense of an existential project gone awry. In
his relentless reaching toward a future totally discontinuous with a
hateful past - a future in which an artist of immense poetic gifts and
insatiable emotional hungers could live, love, and create at the
highest pitch of intensity- Mayakovsky had embraced Lenin's
surgically clean break with the old and found himself trapped in a
grimly authoritarian blend of political utopianism. As he was about
to pull the trigger, he must have known that the express train which
he had boarded some fifteen years earlier was hurtling to a wrong
destination .
In a moving essay, written in the wake of Mayakovsky's death,
Roman Jakobson spoke eloquently for the futurist generation, "We
