Books: The Comrade Who Couldn’t

THE BEDBUG AND SELECTED POETRY 317 pp.)—Vladimir Mayakovsky—Meridian ($1.55).

Not every Russian who changes his shirt commits suicide, but Russian suicides cling to the superstition that a change of linen should precede death. On April 14, 1930 Poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky changed his shirt. Then he slipped a cartridge into his revolver and played Russian roulette. He lost. According to his friend Boris Pasternak, “the news rocked the telephones, blanketed faces with pallor … [people] all the way up the staircase wept and pressed against each other.” It was a blow from which Soviet literature has never quite recovered, for Mayakovsky was the unchallenged laureate of the revolution. A critic named Josef Stalin flatly acclaimed him as “the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.”

Why did Mayakovsky kill himself? He was the darling of the masses, a huge handsome fellow of 36, whose thundering voice and flamboyant presence were guaranteed to fill any hall in Russia. Fellow poets honored him by becoming imitators-critics marveled at craftsmanship that seemed to make the Russian language his private property. Shortly before his death he had promised to “raise/above the heads of a gang of self-seeking/poets and rogues./ 11 the hundred volumes of my Communist-committed books.” But the last poem he ever wrote ended: “Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind./Now you and I are quits.’

Steam & Soap. In a sensible introduction to The Bedbug and Selected Poetry Editor Patricia Blake recognizes the danger of clinging to any single clue to explain why the poet courted death. Mayakovsky had suffered a nervous breakdown, had been ill with a stubborn grippe, and was always ‘deadly bored.” In spite of his popularity, he was chronically lonely and in spite of his laureate’s standing the shifting Party lines of Soviet literature had left him with a persecution complex. Besides, the latest of his long series of love affairs was going badly. Most important all, he was fed up with propaganda and propagandists. “You can’t immediately steam out the swarm of bureaucrats” he wrote. “There wouldn’t be enough bathhouses or soap.”

Mayakovsky had lived as a revolutionary since childhood. His father was an impoverished nobleman reduced to forest ranger and Vladimir was only twelve when he stole his father’s shotguns and delivered them to the local rebels for the revolution 1905; At 15, already a Bolshevik handyman in Moscow, he sat in prison for eleven months reading every book he could get hold of. Back in circulation, he went to art school for awhile. But when a painter friend heard one of his poems, he proclaimed young Vladimir a genius, set him on the road to becoming what his American friend Max Eastman called the “nearest to the banging in of a cyclone that poetry ever produced.”

For the last 13 years of his life, Mayakovsky performed Homeric feats for the revolution. He worked for party newspapers, drew more than 3,000 revolutionary posters for which he wrote flaming exhortations in prose and poetry. He wrote a brash poem inviting the Eiffel Tower to leave its decadent city and return with him to Moscow. He visited the U.S. in 1925 and dutifully reported that it was a guardian of bigotry, cents and bacon ” But as time went on, he found more and more to irritate him at home, saw with growing disgust the commissars making the rules for poets.

Love & Flowers. By 1928 Mayakovsky was disillusioned enough to write The Bedbug, a satire of Communist society so pointed that even the dullest party hack was set to squirming. His villain is Prisypkin, a smug, card-carrying, vulgar proletarian who typifies the new Soviet man Prisypkin is stored in a freezer, and by 1978, in the last half of the play. Russian life has become so dehumanized that love tobacco, vodka, even flowers have become half-forgotten matters of history. Poor Prisypkin is now restored, and because of his simple humanity, he quickly becomes a curiosity. He asks for books on roses and daydreams; his every desire seems so odd that he winds up as an exhibit in a guarded cage.

Even in English, Mayakovsky’s writing (13 volumes) has the untamed drive of a runaway tractor. Though much of it to a Western ear is talented but tiring rabble-rousing, in the lyrics and in the love poems speaks a genuine poet’s voice-speaking more truly than any party-line drivel. “Always to shine/to shine everywhere/to the very deeps of the last days./

to shine—/and t0 hdl with everything else!/That is my motto—/and the sun’s!” Snatches of exuberant, pure song survive their pedestrian translation and make Mayakovsky sound like a moujik Whitman