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Maiakovskii and the Mobile Monument: Alternatives to Iconoclasm in Russian Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

James Rann
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Abstract

This article examines Vladimir Maiakovskii's frequent references to statues and monuments in his poetry in relation to traditions of iconoclasm in Russian culture in order not only to shed light on the poet's attitude toward the role of the past in the creation of a new culture but also to investigate the way in which the destruction, relocation, and transformation of monuments, both in the urban landscape and in art, reflects political change in Russia. James Rann demonstrates that, while Maiakovskii often invoked a binary iconoclastic discourse in which creation necessitates destruction, his poetry also articulated a more nuanced vision of cultural change through the symbol of the moving monument: the statue is preserved but also transformed and liberated. Finally, an analysis of “Vo ves' golos” shows how Maiakovskii's myth of the statue helped him articulate his relationship to Soviet power and to his own poetic legacy.

Type
Heritage Matters: (De-)Mobilizing Monuments and (MIS-)Shaping Identities
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , Winter 2012 , pp. 766 - 791
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2012

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References

I would like to thank Robin Aizlewood, Andreas Schönle, Mark D. Steinberg, and two anonymous readers for Slavic Review for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Epigraph taken from Edwin Morgan, “A Human Head,” Dreams and Other Nightmares: New and Uncollected Poems, 1954-2009 (Edinburgh, 2010).

1. The quote is from the poet Nikolai Tikhonov in his speech at the unveiling of the Maiakovskii monument, reported in Moskovskaia pravda, 29 July 1958. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

2. Ibid.

3. From the reminiscences of Konstantin Kedrov in Izvestiia, 29 July 2008.

4. Ibid.

5. Brown, Edward J., Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, 1973), 370.Google Scholar Byt, in this context, means the stultifying force of conformity and mundanity.

6. Krystyna Pomorska, “Majakovskij and the Myth of Immortality in the Russian Avant-Garde,” in Nils Åke Nilsson, ed., The Slavic Literatures and Modernism: A Nobel Symposium, August 5-8, 1985 (Stockholm, 1987), 63.

7. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Epos i lirika sovremennoi Rossii,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1980), 2:417.

8. Iurii Karabchievskii, Voskresenie Maiakovskogo (Moscow, 1990), 142, 192.

9. Roman Jakobson, “The Statue in Puškin's Poetic Mythology,” in Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds., Language in Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 318, 319. Emphasis in the original.

10. See Bethea, David M., Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, 1998), 96.Google Scholar

11. Jakobson, “Statue in Puškin,” 319.

12. Clay, Richard, “Bouchardon's Statue of Louis XV: Iconoclasm and the Transformation of Signs,” in Boldrick, Stacy and Clay, Richard, eds., Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (Aldershot, Eng., 2007), 94.Google Scholar For new approaches to iconoclasm, see, for example, Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London, 1997).Google Scholar

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16. Monuments and statues operate in slightly different ways, but their functions are sufficiently similar to be considered together.

17. Michalski, Sergiusz, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870-1997 (London, 1998), 107.Google Scholar See also Forest, Benjamin and Johnson, Juliet, “Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 3 (September 2002): 526 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clay, Richard, “Introduction: Contested Objects, Contested Terms,” in Boldrick, and Clay, , eds., Iconoclasm, 7.Google Scholar

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20. See Figes, Orlando and Kolonitskii, Boris I., Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999)Google Scholar; Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 51-91.

21. See Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Revolution, 32, 54.

22. In the case of 1991, see Polly Jones, ‘“Idols in Stone’ or Empty Pedestals? Debating Revolutionary Iconoclasm in the Post-Soviet Transition,” in Boldrick and Clay, eds., Iconoclasm, 241-59. The Narkompros paper Iskusstvo kommuny featured an article on public statuary in most issues of its short existence during the winter of 1918 and spring of 1919.

23. See Jakobson, “Statue in Puškin,” 322; and Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska, Dialogues, trans. Christian Hubert (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), 146.

24. For example, Maria Rubins has shown how Aleksandr Blok used statues to critique symbolism. Rubins, Crossroad of Arts, 140.

25. David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu,” in Vladimir Markov, ed., Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov (Munich, 1967), 50. Boris Gasparov alludes to this association when he suggests diat Pushkin is thrown overboard “like a pagan divinity.” See Gasparov, Boris, “Introduction: The ‘Golden Age’ and Its Role in the Cultural Mythology of Russian Modernism,” in Gasparov, Boris, Hughes, Robert, and Paperno, Irina, eds., Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley, 1992), 8.Google Scholar See also Lars Kleberg, “Notes on the Poem Vladimir Il'ič Lenin,” in Bengt Jangfeldt and Nils Åke Nilsson, Vladimir Majakovskij: Memoirs and Essays (Stockholm, 1975), 166-78.

26. Lotman, Iurii M. and Uspenskii, Boris A., “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” in Nakhimovsky, Alexander D. and Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone, eds., The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by Iurii M. Lotman, Lidiia Ia. Ginzburg, Boris A. Uspenskii (Ithaca, 1985), 33.Google Scholar This essay has a clear influence on Gasparov's reading of “Poshchechina,” in which he describes the futurist Pushkin as the standard Silver Age Pushkin, with the exception that “they simply attached a minus sign,” a phrase taken from “Binary Models.“

27. Povest’ vremennykh let, ed. D. S. Likhachev (St. Petersburg, 1999), 190.

28. The Primary Chronicle's narrative of Vladimir's overturning of the idol can clearly be understood within a wider context of Orthodox opprobrium for the statue, motivated by the church's interpretation of the Mosaic commandment against graven images as a prohibition against any depictions except painted icons.

29. See Jangfeldt, Bengt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917-1921 (Stockholm, 1977), 52.Google Scholar

30. Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1959), 2:95.

31. See Lodder, “Lenin's Plan,” 21.

32. See Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 77.Google Scholar

33. Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Radovat'sia rano,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh, ed. V A. Katanian (Moscow, 1955-1961; hereafter PSS), 2:16.

34. Ibid.

35. A. Lunacharskii, “Lozhka protivoiadiia,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 4 (29 December 1918): 1.

36. “Ot redaktsii,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 4 (29 December 1918): 1. See Jerzy Tasarski “Komfuty: Ideologiczne awangardy w okresie wojennego kommunizmu,” Przegląd humanistyczny 4 (1968): 41-59, for a discussion of the possibilities of reading this poem metaphorically.

37. See Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 115.Google Scholar

38. For instances in which Maiakovskii likens the culture of the past to statuary, see Maiakovskii, PSS, 12:45, 81, 434-35.

39. Maiakovskii, PSS, 4:304. For a more detailed examination of the statue contexts of this poem, see Irina Ivaniushina, ‘“Mednyi vsadnik’ Vladimira Maiakovskogo,” Voprosy literatury, pt. 4 (2000): 312-26. For the connection with Lenin's note, see Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 141. For Lenin's criticism of Maiakovskii, see E. I. Naumov, V. V. Maiakovskii: Seminarii (Leningrad, 1963), 210: “Are you not ashamed to vote for the publication of 5000 copies of Maiakovskii's 150,000,000? Rubbish, stupid, arrant stupidity and pretentiousness. I think that you should print only 1 in 10 of such things and not more than 1500 copies for libraries and eccentrics. And flog Lunacharskii for futurism.“

40. Maiakovskii, PSS, 4:305.

41. See Maiakovskii, PSS, 6:252, for Maiakovskii's similar concerns about Karl Marx.

42. See Kleberg, “Notes on the Poem Vladimir Il'ič Lenin,” 168; Tumarkin, Nina, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 207.Google Scholar

43. Kleberg, “Notes on the Poem Vladimir Il'ič Lenin,” 169.

44. Maiakovskii, PSS, 6:54. See Pomorska, “Majakovskij and the Myth of Immortality,” 63.

45. See, for instance, Burliuk, David, “Plodonosiashchie,” Stikhotvoreniia, ed. Krasitskii, S. R. (St. Petersburg, 2002), 407.Google Scholar

46. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:123.

47. Tsvetaeva, “Moi Pushkin,” Sochineniia, 2:332.

48. Valerii Ia. Briusov, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, ed. P. G. Antokol'skii.A. S. Miasnikov, S. S. Narchatovyi, and N. S. Tikhonov (Moscow, 1973-1975), 3:43. For further examples of Pushkin as a beacon of cultural continuity, see Hughes, Robert P., “Pushkin in Petrograd, February 1921,” in Gasparov, , Hughes, , and Paperno, , eds., Cultural Mythologies, 204-13.Google Scholar

49. See Halina Stephan, “Lef” and the Left Front ofthe Arts (Munich, 1981), xii.

50. See A. V. Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinmii (Moscow, 1963-1967), 1:39, 38-43; Anatoly V Lunacharsky, On Literature and Art, ed. A. Lebedev, trans. Y. Ganushkin (Moscow, 1965), 93-101.

51. Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:39.

52. Maiakovskii, PSS, 12:265, 266.

53. For the importance of Pushkin's irreverence in Russian modernism, see Slobin, Greta N., “Appropriating the Irreverent Pushkin,” in Gasparov, , Hughes, , and Paperno, , eds., Cultural Mythologies, 214-30.Google Scholar Maiakovskii's emphasis on Pushkin's irreverent qualities may well have been inspired by similar remarks in Sergei Esenin's address to the Pushkin statue, written before Maiakovskii's in 1924. See Sergei Esenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v semi tamakh, ed. Iu. L. Prokushev (Moscow, 1995-2000), 1:203.

54. Maiakovskii, Vladimir, “Vystupleniia na dispute ‘Lef ili blef,'” in Vinogradov, V. V., ed., Novoe o Maiakovskom (Moscow, 1958), 66.Google Scholar

55. Jakobson, “Statue in Puškin,” 364.

56. Nikolai Punin, “O pamiatnikakh,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 14 (9 March 1919): 3.

57. Paperny, Vladimir, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. Hill, John and Barris, Roann (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), xxiii, 13, 32.Google Scholar It is tempting to see the influence here of Paperny's father, Zinovii, and his reading of Maiakovskii: see Z. Papernyi ‘“Ot Pushkina do nashikh gazetnykh dnei … ,'” in A. A. Mikhailov and S. Lesnevskii, eds., V mire Maiakovskogo: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1984), 80-116.

58. The Italian futurists are famous for their paeans to motion (especially relevant here is Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which attempts to render movement in a sculpture); their Russian counterparts Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh both also mention moving statues, as do non-futurists such as Aleksandr Blok and Innokentii Annenskii. See Velimir Khlebnikov, , “Pamiatnik,” Velimir Khlebnikov: Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, ed. Duganov, R. (Moscow, 2000-2006), 1:216 Google Scholar; Kruchenykh, Aleksei, “Idite k chortu,” in Markov, , ed., Manifesty i programmy, 80 Google Scholar; Wanner, Adrian, “Blok's Sculptural Myth,” Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 236-50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Alexandra, Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth Century Poetry (Amsterdam, 2006), 49, 118.Google Scholar For other influences on the avant-garde passion for movement, see Gur'ianova, Nina, “Estetika anarkhii v teorii rannego russkogo avangarda,” in Meilakh, M. B. and Sarab'ianov, D. B., eds., Poezia i Zhivopis': Sbornik trudov pamiati N. I. Khardzhieva (Moscow, 2000), 92–108.Google Scholar

59. Man, Paul de, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London, 1983), 152.Google Scholar

60. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:163, 157. Katherine Lahu, “On Living Statues and Pandora, Kamennye baby and Futurist Aesthetics: The Female Body in Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy,” Russian Review 58, no. 3 (July 1999): 432-55. The gigantic woman is listed in the dramatis personae as Maiakovskii's Girlfriend. Lahti identifies her not only as a parody of the symbolist Eternal Feminine but as a response to the contemporary theatrical vogue for women to pose as statues and for statues to come alive.

61. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:158.

62. Robert Leach, “A Good Beginning: Victory over the Sun and Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy Reassessed,” Russian Literature 13, no. 1 (January 1983): 110.

63. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:165.

64. See Sandler, Stephanie, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, 2004), 97, 110.Google Scholar

65. See M. P. Alekseev, Pushkin i mirovaia literatura, ed. G. P. Makagonenko and S. A. Fomichev (Leningrad, 1987), 10. The new lines were written in postrevolutionary orthography which, it could be argued, was in itself something of a symbol of the new regime.

66. Lodder, “Lenin's Plan,” 23.

67. This “museumification” anticipates the creation of “sculpture parks” for communist statuary in the 1990s. See Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders, “What Does Iconoclasm Create? What Does Preservation Destroy? Reflections on Iconoclasm in East Asia,” in Boldrick and Clay, eds., Iconoclasm, 15-35. In their typology of iconoclasm the authors define this sort of recontextualization as “negative cultural redefinition” in which “the object is preserved intact, and even highly visible, but redefined by its displacement into a new and secular context in which the agents aim to give it a clearly negative connotation” (21).

68. Forest and Johnson, “Unraveling the Threads,” 538.

69. Jones, ‘“Idols in Stone,'” 248.

70. See Gamboni, Destruction of Art, 75.

71. Ibid., 81.

72. Komar, Vitaly and Melamid, Aleksandr, “What Is to Be Done with Monumental Propaganda?” in Ashton, Dore, ed., Monumental Propaganda (New York, 1994), 9.Google Scholar

73. This emphasis on the abilities of text vis-à-vis other art forms aligns Maiakovskii's moving statues with a long tradition of descriptions of impossible ecphrasis in poetry in which stationary works of art are described as if moving: text can both counteract and highlight a mimetic shortcoming of figurative art—its failure to replicate movement.

74. For instance, Komar and Melamid imagine a noose around the neck of the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, an aesthetic change that draws attention to the political connotations of the statue, not to its form.

75. See Iu. N. Tynianov, “O parodii,” Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow, 1977), 294: “All methods of parodying, without exception, consist of the changing of a literary work or of a moment, which unites a range of works (an author, an almanac, a magazine) or the changing of a range of literary works (a genre)—as a system, in the translation of them into another system.“

76. See Lachmann, Renate, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Sellars, Roy and Wall, Anthony (Minneapolis, 1997)Google Scholar; Voloshinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka, Ladislav and Titunik, I. R. (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).Google Scholar

77. A. A. Potebnia, “Mysl’ i iazyk,” in I. V. Van'ko and A. I. Kolodnaia, eds., Estetika i poetika (Moscow, 1976), 176.

78. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:163. Compare Paul A. Klanderud, “Maiakovskii's Myth of Man, Things and the City: From Poshlost’ to the Promised Land,” Russian Review 55, no. 1 (January 1996): 42: “Maiakovskii is attempting to alter radically their status as semiotic signs, to destroy their banal significations in prerevolutionary urban society.“

79. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:128; Aleksandr Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Maksim Gor'kii, D. D. Blagoi etal. (Moscow, 1937), 5:135.

80. Maiakovskii, PSS, 6:55.

81. See Ekaterina Iu. Andreeva, Sots-Art: Soviet Artists of the 1970s-1980s (East Roseville, Australia, 1995), 28, 44.

82. Komar and Melamid, “What Is to Be Done?” 11.

83. Merewether, “Rise and Fall,” 189.

84. Maiakovskii, PSS, 9:249.

85. Ibid., 11:366.

86. The use of film here, and Maiakovskii's well-documented passion for film in general, accord with his philosophy of mobility—the film director can, even more than the poet, imbue static images with motion. In an earlier screenplay with the significant tide Zakovannaia fil'moi (Shackled by Film, 1918) a movie poster is made to come to life. Maiakovskii, PSS, 11:483-85. For an analysis of moving statues in 1920s films, see Evgenii Margolit, “Monumental Sculptures in Soviet Cinema of the 1920s,” trans. Birgit Beumers, Kinokultura 26 (2009), at http://www.kinokultura.com/2009/26-margolit.shtml (last accessed 21 September 2012).

87. Maiakovskii, PSS, 11:371.

88. The poem, like the play, depicts the progress of the revolutionary cause from 1905 to 1930 and ends witii a paean to the forthcoming Five-Year Plan. Identical rhymes and phrases also appear in both works.

89. See Pomorska, “Majakovskij and the Myth of Immortality,” 60.

90. Maiakovskii, PSS, 6:56.

91. Maiakovskii, PSS, 7:164. Pomorska, “Majakovskij and the Myth of Immortality,” 64. Pomorska has identified this poem as part of a trilogy, including “lubileinoe” and “Sergeiu Eseninu,” in which the poet contemplates “the form of energy into which each man was transformed after the earthly form of energy was no more“; compare Mikhail Weiskopf, Voves’ logos: Religiia Maiakovskogo (Jerusalem, 1997), 109n88: “At the same time, so it seems to me, Maiakovskii's (baroque-futurist) enmity to monuments was by no means that irreconcilable and was corrected by the materialist mystique of the palpable-substantive commemoration of heroes.“

92. Maiakovskii, PSS, 6:55.

93. Ibid., 10:279. Note the way in which time inevitably leads to the petrifaction of everything organic.

94. Ibid.

95. Weiskopf, Vo ves’ logos, 109.

96. Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:282.

97. Weiskopf, Vo ves’ logos, 162.

98. Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:285.

99. Ibid., 10:281.

100. Maiakovskii elsewhere describes roses as the essence of apolitical, sentimental poetry: “Poeziia—eto sidi i nad pozoi noi …” (Poetry is sitting and whimpering over a rose …). From “Piatyi international,” PSS, 4:108. The term sculpture emphasizes the aesthetic rather than the political funcdons of plasdc art.

101. Ibid., 10:279.

102. See, for instance, D. Merezhkovskii, Vechnye sputniki: Pushkin (St. Petersburg, 1906), 5.

103. Maiakovskii describes himself as revolutionary water carrier: “ia assenizator, i vodovoz, / revoliutsiei mobilizovannyi i prizvannyi” (I am a sanitizer and water carrier, mobilized and called up by the revolution). PSS, 10:279. Compare Roman Voitekhovich's observations that the water pipe also allows for some mobility by being a conduit for mobile water. See Roman Voitekhovich, “Monumenty 3,” at http://www.r-v.livejournal.com/237027.html (last accessed 21 September 2012).

104. Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:282.

105. Compare Svedana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 124.

106. Ibid., 136.

107. Ibid., 125. In the less political context of Chelovek (Man, 1918) Maiakovskii produces a similar vision of immortality, contingent on both martyrdom and inscription into the landscape: “—Prokhozhii! / Eto ulitsa Zhukovskogo? […] ‘Ona—Maiakovskogo tysachi let: / on zdes’ zastrelilsia u dveri liubimoi'” (Passer-by! / Is this Zhukovskii street? […] “It's been Maiakovskii Street for thousands of years: / he shot himself here at his lover's door“). PSS, 1:269.

108. For the dutiful service interpretation, see Z. S. Papernyi, Poeticheskii obraz u Maiakovskogo (Moscow, 1961), 423.

109. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:40,1:151.

110. Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, 120.

111. Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:281; Pushkin, Polnoesobraniesochinenii, 2:354.

112. Maiakovskii, PSS, 6:55; Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2:355.

113. Derzhavin, G. R., Sochineniia, ed. Kushner, A. S. (St. Petersburg, 2002), 224 Google Scholar; Horace, , Opera, ed. Keller, Otto and Holder, Alfred (Leipzig, 1899-1925), 1:227.Google Scholar

114. Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:281.

115. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Vasilii Kamenskii, and David Burliuk, “Manifest letuchei federatsii futuristov,” Gazeta futuristov 1 (15 March 1918). Reproduced in Bengt Jangfeldt, “Notes on ‘Manifest Letučej Federacii Futuristov’ and the Revolution of the Spirit,” in Jangfeldt and Nilsson, eds., Vladimir Majakovskij, 152-65.

116. Cited by Roman Jakobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” Language and Literature, 276.

117. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:296.

118. For the Kedrov quote, see Izvestiia, 29 July 2008.

119. For Van der Heijden's painting, see Dore Ashton, “To Degree Zero and Back,” in Ashton, ed., Monumental Propaganda, 17.17.

120. Morgan, “A Human Head.“

121. See Natal'ia Ivanova, Afterword to Karabchievskii, Voskresenie Maiakovskogo, 221.