Jubilee of Jubilee. On the 100th anniversary of the poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Our journey begins with the discussion of futurism as embodiment of new modern poetry. The assemblage by David Burliuk, the 'father of Russian futurism', serves as the starting point, the zero kilometre of the exhibition. We will make a sweeping transition from A Slap in the Face of Public Taste written in 1912, where young Mayakovsky, together with his fellow futurists, calls for 'throwing' Pushkin 'overboard from the Ship of Modernity' (actually, Pushkin’s double with a 'textbook gloss', the worn-out 'mummy' of the poet glorified by enthusiastic school teachers and petit bourgeois), to the night 'walk' of 1924, when Pushkin happens to be the only person able to understand Mayakovsky.
The motif of the (night) walk unfolds in several works: Mayakovsky himself invites us on a promenade with a cane in his hand, casting a familiar piercing look at his vis-a-vis in an unconventional portrait by Boris Korzhevsky. Next to it is Adelaida Pologova's eccentric Pushkin, who seems to be transforming from a 'mummy' into a living and breathing person that throws up his cane into the air as he walks. In Andrei Voznesensky's minimalist drawing, all we see is a cylinder ‘walking away' along the boulevard, with loose curls under it: a touching signature instead of hair.
Curiously, the image created by our contemporary, artist and poet Voznesensky, is consistent with self-portraits by Pushkin (in which he walks together with Onegin along the Neva embankment) and Mayakovsky (in which he approaches the audience wearing a hat, with a cigarette in his teeth). Both the poets were known to be keen on drawing (Mayakovsky loved painting too).
Having digressed into the inevitable discussion of love and nocturnal sadness, we return to the theme the Jubilee author cared about: poetry and its purpose. Mayakovsky believed that words could have more weight than any object or a body. What we see here are materialized words, literally figurative poetry, a suit covered with poetic lines. This ingenious object was designed by Valery Mishin and Tamara Bukovskaya in the 1990s and was clearly inspired by the then rediscovered Russian avant-garde art.
'Looking for speech accurate and naked', this is how Mayakovsky paraphrased Pushkin ('the charm of naked simplicity' from the drafts for Eugene Onegin), and in this confession one can feel the credo of the 'first poet of the revolution'.
A new way of living achieved through a complete reorganization of daily routine was key for the constructivism philosophy, which Mayakovsky shared. He believed that a poet should always write about life, express themselves directly, without embellishments. According to him, a poet's work should be equated with industrial production. It is no coincidence, of course, that Mayakovsky took the lead of the Left Front of the Arts, a famous magazine with a wonderful team of poets and constructivist artists.
Mayakovsky's collaboration with Alexander Rodchenko was especially fruitful, and they influenced each other’s art for many years. Their shared aspirations, as well as the spirit of the time itself with the palpable emergence of a new era, is visible in these Alexander Rodchenko's photographs and posters, created in collaboration with Mayakovsky.
The exhibition showcases a testimony to the constructivist utopia, a rare copy of a tea set, made after a 1922 sketch by Rodchenko. The set was supposed to become one of the items that would transform housekeeping and therefore life, however, it was produced only in 1993 as collectable avant-garde tableware.
Alexander Rodchenko's elegant tea set rhymes with a piercingly gloomy Still Life with a Coffee Pot painted by his daughter Varvara during World War II. These objects manifest two extremes: a poetic dream of a new world and a harsh reality that informs the artistic vision.
Varvara Rodchenko’s painting is close in intonation to the sad lines of Jubilee: 'I am glad to see you, happy that you are at the table'. Mayakovsky shares with Pushkin his stories of failed love ('torment the heart with rhymes — that's the end of love'), discusses how the Russian language is distorted in Soviet abbreviations (KOOPSAKH) and describes the saddening state of affairs on the poetry scene (‘The gills of rhymes are often puffed in people like us on this poetic sand'), all this in a tavern table conversation, a traditional Russian consolation.
Mayakovsky’s 'Give us glasses!' reminds of Pushkin’s 'Let's drink with grief: where is the mug?' These lines by association remind one of Baudelaire too, as shown in a graphic sheet Wine of the Ragmen by Alexandra Korsakova. Baudelaire was the first poet to describe a contemporary artist wandering around a city, having drinks, experiencing life in all its facets, and thus exploring the world (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863).
Boris Sukhanov represents Pushkin as a lively interlocutor, ugly and disproportionate, with huge lips. This beautiful example of 1920s graphics from the MMOMA collection seems to be inspired by Mayakovsky's lines: 'I guess, during your lifetime — I think — you raved too. An African!'
Indeed, Mayakovsky's muse 'blurts out' a whole array of important things! The phrase 'you raved too' is a vivid testimony to that: Mayakovsky, with his explosive reactivity, became known as a hooligan, shocking the public every now and then. He deliberately created an image of a literature warrior, constantly fighting with poets and critics.
Therefore, when he complains about the 'monarotonous landscape' (a neologism coined from the word 'monotonous' and a pearl among countless early Soviet abbreviations, Narobraz, the Committee of People's Education), he laments not just the absence of real poetry, but also the dull monotony of the poetic environment, these empty plains with thin soil, where neither an animated discussion nor a real storm of feelings are possible. This joyless poetic landscape is represented in the exhibition through 1920s photographic portraits of the authors mentioned in Jubilee.
The only figure standing out against the said 'poetic sand' is Sergei Yesenin. In Mayakovsky's texts and in our exhibition, he appears in two of his guises: as a cowboy (Vasil Hannanov’s painting) and a dandy 'in chevrette gloves' (in the photo documentation of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe's performance). These two contrasting images seem to visually enhance each other and even mysteriously merge. The primitivist cow corresponds to Yesenin’s well-known language clarity and his rustic poetics; it serves as a visual foundation for the overall composition. The artistic scene on the Tverskoy Boulevard with Yesenin (Mamyshev-Monroe) and Isadora Duncan (the actress' name is unfortunately unknown), exquisitely dressed in costumes not matching the weather, shows the buffoonish nature of Mayakovsky's eternal opponent and his weaknesses: dandyism, carousing, and occasional insensitivity to vulgarity.
Despite unending controversies and mutual rejection, Mayakovsky and Yesenin appreciated and distinguished each other among other colleagues. Later, Mayakovsky mourned Yesenin's death and wrote a poem dedicated to him, which he published as a brochure in 1926. The cover design featured a photograph by Alexander Rodchenko with a railway bridge as a symbol of the modern era, presented in the exhibition too.
The Yesenin element — a cow and carousing on the boulevards — is contrasted here with the Mayakovsky element — a poetic code of reality, a captivating interpretation of 'accurate and naked speech' represented in Ekaterina Pugach’s painting (Mayakovsky Poems).
Encrypted verses fill almost the entire canvas and refer to Mayakovsky's self-focus, often mentioned by his contemporaries. The visual design of the poetry here can be read as his portrait. The lettering rhymes with Mayakovsky’s embodied presence, him 'charging' the whole space with his energy, which can be felt even through documentary footage.
Further along we see Cat and Pushkin featuring an unknown interlocutor, in which one can guess Mayakovsky. They are dazed on the boulevard against a dawn, tired revellers, whose heads are swollen from all the wandering, wine and talking. (In this painting, Oleg Lang most likely showed himself in Pushkin's company, but the theme of a walk echoes Jubilee.)
'The dawn incandesced the rays’. Here Mayakovsky suddenly catches himself: 'A policeman may start looking for you [...] Let me help you get back on the pedestal'. A sketch by sisters Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg and Nikolai Khodataev for the cartoon In Pursuit of Glory (1926) seems to capture this very moment when Mayakovsky, having climbed onto the pedestal of the Pushkin monument, helpfully offers his hand to his hunched companion, in which one recognizes an aged but still alive Alexander Pushkin.
'They are very used to you on the Tverskoy Boulevard': in Alexei Savelyev's photograph the Pushkin statue resumes its place. In the unfocused image, we sense the morning moist freshness and drowsiness, and in the large foaming cloud resembling the poet's head, we still see him, the person who has just walked with Mayakovsky around Moscow all night.
'After death, we will stand almost side by side', wrote the author of Jubilee, referring to the Russian alphabet and his and Pushkin's status as poets. However, this line turned out to be prophetic in another sense, since the monument to Mayakovsky was erected in 1958 next to the Pushkin monument.
Inauguration of the monument to the first Soviet poet is captured in Nikolai Lavrentiev’s photograph taken from an unconventional perspective, with a new statue seeming to rise beyond the space-time coordinates. We see the cover that used to hide the monument before the ceremony falling on the poet's shoulder like an ancient Roman toga (as observed by A. Lavrentiev). It produces a surprising image: the Antiquity-resembling 'garment' flies in the wind, animating the statue and introducing it to eternity.
This photo is echoed by a photomontage piece, a joint work by Nikolai Lavrentiev and Varvara Rodchenko, son-in-law and daughter of Alexander Rodchenko, who always remained the main reference in their art. In this piece, they used the famous 'walking' photo portrait of Mayakovsky, made by Alexander Rodchenko in 1924, a few months before Jubilee was written (later this photo will be featured on the cover of The Conversation with the Financial Inspector about Poetry (Moscow, 1926), a poem referring to Pushkin’s The Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet). Wearing a coat and a hat, with papers in his hands, Mayakovsky literally walks out into the world.
In the 1973 photomontage Mayakovsky, a miracle seems to happen, and the spirit of the poet, still in the same guise but with a radiant halo, powerfully and confidently rises above the city right in front of us. One recognizes the poet not only by his familiar gaze from under his eyebrows, but also by the contrast with his 'double', an almost toy-like monument in the foreground.
Life, death, fate of a poet and immortality are the most important themes for both Mayakovsky and Pushkin. The final section of our route interweaves these motifs.
'So to speak, a slave of honour... slain by a bullet...', Mayakovsky writes, paraphrasing Mikhail Lermontov. In the overall context of Jubilee, these lines are in tune with the thought expressed by Alexander Blok in his speech for the 84th anniversary of Pushkin's death: '[...] Pushkin was not killed by Dantes' bullet. The lack of air killed him'. In this sense, the fates of Pushkin and Mayakovsky become similar.
Many artists who were striving to understand Pushkin's tragedy explored his duel and his last days. MMOMA has a small collection of works on Pushkin's death. Together with the artists, we are trying to peer into the past, 'see' what happened with our own eyes. We are gripped by horror and piercing deadly loneliness… As Mayakovsky wrote: ‘I may be the only one today who really regrets you are gone'. Like Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, captured in photographs from the Monuments series, we can suddenly feel the futility of all our aspirations against the background of the tragedy of a great poet, be it Pushkin or Mayakovsky.
However, suddenly we recover our strength, we are saved by an exclamation from Jubilee's author, who sounds like he has discovered the source of eternal regeneration: 'I adore all life!' This momentum is supported by The Apple Tree on the Pushkin Square: it is no accident that a tree of life grew here: it soars above flowers, like a resurrected Pushkin, stretching out his arms to the world in glee. It promises joy and consolation to all lovers of poetry.
