1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution - looted wine and revolutionary ostriches

In the versions of Alexander Blok’s “The Twelve” that are not rock operas, the marauding Reds do some looting:

Open up the cellars –
treat the thirsty fellas!

Those lines, from the Dralyuk and Chandler translation found in 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), have a little jolt now because of the highly instructive way this anthology is organized.

The book is a collection of poems, fiction, and whatnots addressing the 1917 revolution.  The pieces are organized thematically – and what themes!  The first section titled “Stolen Wine,” is about the looting and destruction, by smashing or glugging, of wine cellars, some of them massively valuable.  A narrow concern, I first thought, but it was a live political issue, an action filled with symbolic meaning – what is the Revolution doing; what is it for?

And it produced poems, like this terrific fantasy of wine-flooded streets by Marina Tsvetaeva:

The moon in a cloud of wine. – Who’s that? Stop!
Be my comrade, sweetheart: drink up!
Merry stories go round:
Deep in wine – a couple has drowned.  (tr. Dralyuk)

In a Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam collection, I doubt the wine would stand out, but six poems in a row make the point.  And then the image, the issue, recurs throughout the book, as in the Blok poem.  Clever; useful.

These interconnections run through the anthology.  The banner that opens “The Twelve” reappears in Mikhail Prishvin’s “The Blue Banner” – they were published on the same day! – as does the looting theme.  A merchant buys a crate of tea at a bad time to be carrying goods around Petersburg.  The wine cellar theme appears, too, as the merchant dreams himself towards death, marching first “to the wine cellars where the Red Guards are shooting off the drunkards for the third day straight” (194).

The loose, almost conversational Prishvin story is translated by Lisa Hayden, better known here as Lizok.  I know nothing more about Prishvin than is contained in the introductory material.  One of the many benefits of a good anthology – new writers.  Only one piece seemed of purely historical interest, the six pages of apocalyptic religious ranting by Vasily Rozanov.  Good to know such things existed, but six pages was plenty.

Everyone has been reading Teffi lately.  Her pieces are highlights.  “Every bit of him is tightly stuffed, like a leather football, squealing and cracking at the seams, but unable to fly into the air unless it is kicked” (126) – that’s Lenin.

Newspaper boys were nipping about among the queues, together with vendors of sbiten and fried pies.  Michel wanted to try one, but I talked him out of it – such filthy things, smelling of tallow candles.  (134)

The characters are in line, waiting to be guillotined.  Satire so brutal no one wanted to publish it.  But given the circumstances, I am amazed anyone was publishing anything.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, from “To Russia”:

Here I come,
an ostrich from a distant land,
wearing these feathers: stanzas, metres, rhymes.
I foolishly try to bury my head,
dig it into my clinking plumes…
Exotic, outlandish,
I might as well vanish
under the fury of all Decembers.  (tr. James Womack)

I guess I will take the next couple of days off.

Here is a man in ecstasy - Mayakovsky's fish of the imagination

More, now, in my series on hastily read Russian poets and their barely-understood poems.  Today, Vladimir Mayakovsky, then Anna Akhmatova, and next week, I guess, Boris Pasternak.

What these three poets have in common, aside from chronology, is that for the hasty, English-only reader, their poetry is inseparable from their biographies.  They all have such strong stories.  As if their poetry is not muted enough by translation, their frightening, heartening, interesting personal histories practically swamp the poems.  I mean, as I am reading them, in books with fifty pages of introduction and ninety pages of poetry.

I am having trouble focusing the microscope, so to speak.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was a wonderful nut, a true anarchist of the spirit, who inexplicably became Stalin’s favorite poet, a preference that was also a kind of curse.  Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930, at the age of thirty-six, is both a mystery and overdetermined.

Where Velimir Khlebnikov was closer to a pure language poet, Mayakovsky used the avant garde toolbox to write about himself, his love affairs and revolutionary activities and arguments and poetry.  Mayakovsky, in the middle of a romance in Paris, has been asked to write political poetry, and responds with “Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love”:

Public squares begin to buzz;
carriages roll past;
I stroll about,
                         jotting verse
in my notebook.
Cars
        whir
                  along the street
without knocking me down.
They understand,
                                the smart fellows:
here is a man
                         in ecstasy.
The assembly of visions
                                            and ideas
is brimmed
                     to the lid.
Here
         even bears
might grow wings.  (“Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love,” 1929, 215-7)

Mayakovsky wrote plenty of propaganda poems, too, a third of his collected works, and drew propaganda posters, none of which is included in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, tr. George Reavey and Max Hayward.  This side of the poet remains a puzzle to me.  He is so exuberant, as in the 1915 “The Cloud in Trousers”:

I never want
to read anything.
Books?
What are books?

Formerly I believed
books were made like this:
a poet came.
lightly opened his lips,
and the inspired fool burst into song –
if you please!
But it seems,
before they can launch a song,
poets must tramp for days with callused feet,
and the sluggish fish of the imagination
flounders softly in the sludge of the heart.  (75)

The English poems display an inspiring variety of metaphors.

Most puzzling of all is the 1929 play The Bedbug, a satire of science, the Soviets, futurism (small-F), Communism, etc., just the sort of thing to get a writer in serious trouble.  A worker, a Party member, Ivan Prisypkin, is marrying into a bourgeois family, where he will abandon his Soviet ideals and become Pierre Skripkin, even if now he is so vulgar that mistakes brassieres for bonnets.  By accident, he is frozen and resurrected in the future – 1979 – where he is no longer recognized as human, only barely distinguishable from the bedbug that was frozen with him.

PRISYPKIN:  What is all this?  What did we fight for?  Why did we shed our blood, if I can’t dance to my heart’s content – and I’m supposed to be a leader of the new society!  (292)

But dancing has been replaced with calisthenics and propaganda:

ZOYA BERYOZKINA:  Tomorrow I’ll take you to see a dance performed by twenty thousand male and female workers on the city square.  It’s a gay rehearsal of a new work-system on the farms.

The Bedbug played in 1929 and 1930 and was a failure; it was revived in the 1950s, post-Stalin, and was a smash.  It is something else, especially the screwball, Marx Brothers-like wedding scene.

In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.  (“Past One o’Clock…,” 1930, 237)

I guess so.  Then Mayakovsky spins the chamber of his revolver and points it at his chest.