There were two famous phrases about the time: that life had become better, more joyous, and that Mayakovsky was and remained the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. For the second phrase I thanked the author of these words with a personal letter, because they freed me from the exaggeration of my own significance that had begun to afflict me in the middle of the 1930s. I love life and am satisfied with it. I do not need its additional gilding. I do not imagine life outside of mystery and obscurity, life in the mirrored gleam of the exhibition window.
Mayakovsky began to be cultivated forcefully, like potatoes in the time of Catherine the Great. This was his second death. He is not guilty of it.
—Boris Pasternak, "People and Positions" 1
In the late 1950s, Pasternak wrote perhaps the most succinct, widely quoted epilogue to Vladimir Mayakovsky's biography and career. In commenting on the phrase that transformed Mayakovsky into the Soviet State poet, Pasternak centers on how these words affected his own consciousness and poetic activity. He responds to the author of this phrase personally, in writing, stressing the effect of this proclamation on his own self-image as a poet. However, in addition to revealing his personal reaction, Pasternak also hints at the extent of the larger cultural process that created the new Soviet Mayakovsky. He implies that Stalin's praise of Mayakovsky was inseparable from the statement of optimism and victory in Stalin's other famous proclamation from 1935: "Life has become better, life has become more joyous." As Pasternak suggests, Mayakovsky's "canonization" was tied to profound changes in Soviet cultural life in the 1930s. 2
The phrase to which Pasternak refers is Stalin's famous statement about Mayakovsky published in Pravda on 5 December 1935. 3 Stalin's proclamation appeared in a front-page editorial that declared Mayakovsky "the best, most talented poet of our Soviet epoch," and added that "indifference to his memory or his works is a crime." 4 Remembering how this phrase affected him, Pasternak also hints at the implications these words carried for the community at large and for the control of literary value. In describing the state "cultivation" of Mayakovsky, Pasternak inverts the usual implications of the agricultural simile. Mayakovsky was propagated like potatoes, but instead of bringing nourishment and life, this cultivation brings poetic death to Mayakovsky, and presumably to those who were "fed" him. Paradoxically, however, the process gives Pasternak life by preventing him from becoming the object of this deadly cultivation; Pasternak implies that this statement about Mayakovsky allowed him to remain both a living man and a living poet. 5 Within the context of the 1930s, Pasternak's choice of simile hints at how the state applied nonliterary projects and plans to literary life; it also evokes the enforced collectivization of the 1930s, and the agricultural disaster that followed. In the end, however, Pasternak is writing not to describe this process, but to condemn it morally, while absolving Mayakovsky from blame for his Soviet afterlife. In the sentence "He is not guilty of it," Pasternak portrays the official Soviet canonization of Mayakovsky as a criminal act or a moral transgression. He writes to vindicate Mayakovsky by emphasizing the difference between the living poet and his objectified image in Soviet culture.
Most non-Soviet scholars who have discussed Mayakovsky's Soviet "canonization" have done so in order to judge him; they either absolve Mayakovsky of guilt, as Pasternak does, or blame him for his posthumous Soviet myth. 6 However, the need to take a position on Mayakovsky's responsibility for his "second death" has inhibited study of how precisely this "second death" came about. Few scholars have attempted to analyze the Soviet cultivation and circulation of the poet's image, a process that, as Pasternak implies, centered on the propagation of Mayakovsky himself rather than his works. Soviet scholarship could not critically analyze the canonization of Mayakovsky. Many of the post-Glasnost writings on Mayakovsky in Russia have a sensationalist "true crime" flavor, focusing either on his romantic and sexual relationships, or on the gory details of his death; other works have resurrected older arguments against Mayakovsky's companions, Osip and Lili Brik. 7 Little, however, has been written about the institutions that "cultivated" the new Mayakovsky in the Soviet Union after 1935. 8
The context of Stalin's proclamation hints at the multileveled process of cultivation that would create the new image of Mayakovsky. Stalin's comment fixed Mayakovsky's official cultural and literary value, resolving the struggle between Pasternak supporters and Mayakovsky supporters that had come to a head in 1934 at the Soviet Writer's Union Congress. 9 Bukharin's speech at the Congress had praised Mayakovsky but declared, "the time for agitprop in the Mayakovsky style has passed." 10 The Pravda article directly responded to Bukharin in declaring that Mayakovsky's work "was and remains timely." Stalin's pronouncement came in the midst of discussions that Soviet poetry, unlike prose, was poor and underdeveloped. 11 In fact, the overall tone of the Pravda article about Mayakovsky was antagonistic, not so much praising him as denouncing his real and potential opponents. Even the phrasing of Stalin's remark implied that contemporary Soviet poetry was of comparatively low quality. The remark about Mayakovsky, then, was specifically targeted at the intelligentsia. At the same time, Stalin's words were published in Pravda for its general audiences. From the beginning, the change in Mayakovsky's status was framed and promoted not only as a directive to writers but also as a declaration for the entire nation. In this period, all types of readers looked to Pravda for signals on shifts in Party policy and attitudes toward the arts. 12 Stalin's remark, therefore, was both a professional and general directive, one that assigned value but did little to create or define Mayakovsky's image in Soviet culture.
Stalin's words may have resolved the debate over Mayakovsky's significance, but they raised a series of problems for both the party and the literary intelligentsia that would create a new Mayakovsky. Unlike Pushkin and other classic poets who were newly "Sovietized" in the 1930s, Mayakovsky had been dead only five years. Many people still held strong opinions about his work and retained vivid memories of his person. To create and affirm a unified, cohesive myth, the state needed to overcome a number of factors that complicated representations of Mayakovsky as an exemplary Soviet poet. These included the existence of many living contemporaries, Mayakovsky's Futurist past, his unconventional cohabitation with the Briks, his many affairs, his bad reputation among the masses, and last (but not least) his suicide. One particularly challenging problem was Mayakovsky's widespread reputation as an iconoclast and a Futurist, a poet connected with "decadent" Western literary movements. A worker's comment from 1928 shows the extent to which Mayakovsky had come to represent incomprehensible, foreign poetry: "they [modern poets] write completely in the new way, and sometimes we don't understand anything, because we are used to speaking and reading in Russian, but some poet speaks in Mayakovsky (po—Maiakovski), and we can't understand a thing." 13
In affirming Mayakovsky's new position in Soviet literature, Stalin expressed the party's new degree of involvement in literary matters. 14 The Pravda article that quoted Stalin's comments was published alongside a special editorial that declared the party's new authority over literary criticism and literary activity in general:
The party will devote special attention to questions of criticism and attract to this work the best literary and scientific powers . . . the central committee has issued a special directive on criticism and bibliography. Pravda will analyze questions of artistic literature, and periodically publish 'literary pages' (litstranitsy)." 15
Appearing on Pravda's first literary page, the declaration of Mayakovsky's new "Soviet classic" status expressed a new party involvement in questions of literature and literary studies. 16 These literary pages would become an important part of Pravda during the next few years; in particular, they would mark literary anniversaries for the public. These pages often contained a combination of essays, poems, and other genres commemorating an author's birth or death. The literary pages became part of Pravda at the same time that the State began to celebrate "great" writers' anniversary dates with commemorative texts and events, most famously in the massive, state-organized "Pushkin jubilee" of 1937. Stalin's evaluation of Mayakovsky thus inaugurated a new era, one in which the party took explicit control over literary institutions and publications, as well as the definition of literary and cultural value. Stalin's statement about Mayakovsky was part of a larger merger of political and cultural authority that would be expressed most clearly in the state sponsored celebrations for literary res, particularly poets, in the late 1930s. Mayakovsky himself would be celebrated in 1940 with a large, state controlled commemoration of the tenth anniversary of his death.
The diverse events and publications of this celebration can be understood as a "commentary" on Mayakovsky, one that guided interpretation of his life and work. As Rachel Schmidt has shown, a literary classic does not simply reflect a certain set of values, but is a complex text containing diverse, opposing ideals. 17 Because a text may not necessarily pass on the values of the canonizing authority, critical commentary, notes, visual images, and other devices are produced in order to guide the reader and determine how the classic text will be interpreted. In the Soviet Union, literary celebrations became the occasion for producing these kinds of texts, as well as exhibits, amateur conferences, musical performances, and monument dedications. The 1940 Mayakovsky jubilee created a set of texts and events that can be considered a "canonizing commentary." It guided interpretation not only (or even primarily) of Mayakovsky's literary works, but also of his life, poetic genealogy, and historical role in Soviet culture. The state used the creation of such a "commentary" to harness the intelligentsia, work out a new genealogy for Soviet poetry, and build on the didacticism of the 1937 Pushkin jubilee by promoting Mayakovsky as a representative of Soviet cultural identity. 18
Theorizing Mayakovsky's canonization as a cohesive cultural process requires a model of canon formation that can encompass the realities of Soviet cultural institutions and life in the 1930s. Soviet literary culture cannot be explained with Western models of canonization that assume canons are created by an amiable consensus of a group that has both political and cultural power. 19 The Soviet period and the Stalin era in particular require a model that can incorporate coercion as well as consensus, and that can accommodate a shifting relation between these two methods for creating a "classic." Such a model must take into account the long-existing chasm between the intelligentsia and the people (narod) in the history of Russian and Soviet culture, and must incorporate the physical consequences of repressive cultural policy in the Soviet 1930s. Huge numbers of writers were imprisoned, sent to camps, murdered, or driven into silence as the Soviet canon developed.
A monolithic model of the canonizing authority does not fit the Stalinist context, in which political authorities controlled practical aspects of literary production while a cultural elite produced and affirmed literary and cultural products. The canonizing authority itself must be split into political power and cultural elite, as far as such a distinction can be maintained in theory. The party controlled interpretations and modifications of the concept of the classic both by controlling the means of cultural reproduction (press, media, paper, school curriculum, etc) and by physically threatening the cultural elite and the masses. At the same time, the party needed at least the appearance of a separate cultural authority that affirmed Soviet literary and cultural value, a stable source of national identity. 20 The State thus tried to acquire the cultural authority of the intelligentsia and the literary tradition. In this way, the creation of a "Soviet canon" in the late 1930s worked hand in hand with the purges that destroyed or silenced many artists, writers, and critics. 21 It is important to note, however, that the canonization process that created a Mayakovsky "commentary" loosened the intelligentsia's hold on cultural authority not only through repression, but also through dilution. The Party tried to dissolve the specificity of the intelligentsia as a social group by involving the masses in making the "commentary." In the 1930s, the general population, with state sponsorship, became part of the canonizing authority. Popular involvement in literary celebrations, for example, was a major theme of jubilee rhetoric and an essential component of jubilee events. 22 A more dynamic, complex model of canonizing authority, and a more skeptical analysis of the "commentary" itself, is needed to explain Mayakovsky's canonization.
The first Soviet "commentary" on Mayakovsky suggests that canonization is never complete, and that commentaries are neither all encompassing nor static. Like Schmidt, Iuri Striedter argues that the literary classic retains contradictory, potentially subversive values. According to Striedter, in judging a text to be a classic, a canonizing authority must canonize the whole work, not simply parts of it. Consequently, those parts of the text that do not support the values of the reigning ideology must also be canonized and made available to readers. The classic is therefore always dynamic; the process of canonization can not completely eliminate the potential of the textual artifact to support alternate and possibly subversive meanings and values. 23 This model of canonization can also be applied to the Soviet canonization of Mayakovsky himself in the 1930s; this process centered on the poet's biography, physical appearance, and reputation. Striedter suggests using the term canon mainly for texts, however he suggests it can be applied (cautiously) to authors and genres. 24 Striedter perhaps underestimates the Party's power to alter and destroy the textual artifact as well as the biography and physical being of the author. The Soviet canonizing authority could indeed eliminate or fail to publish sections of a text. Political authorities destroyed the classic's subversive potential not only through reinterpretation, but through physical violence and control over publishing. Censorship, obligatory rewrites, the library "special depository" (spetskhran), selective publishing, and outright destruction of texts were all ways of maintaining this control. Nevertheless, Striedter's model helps to explain how Mayakovsky managed to retain contradictory meanings even after canonization. In short, the canonical commentary designed to limit the classic Mayakovsky's subversive potential would, like the classic itself, turn out to be far from monolithic; the literary texts that composed it themselves contained potentially subversive aspects.
Creating this Soviet commentary required control of authoritative sources of evidence. Lili Brik had begun her letter to Stalin by emphasizing her role as keeper of Mayakovsky's archive: "All affairs connected with publication of his poetry and commemoration of his name have been centered on me. I have his entire archive, manuscripts, notebooks, and drafts, all of his things. I am editing his editions. I am approached for materials, information, and photographs." 25 However, after 1935, the state took over her role as caretaker of Mayakovsky's legacy, including the poet's manuscripts, artifacts, and publications. In October 1938, a state directive declared all of Mayakovsky's archive to be state property, and moved to concentrate his artifacts and manuscripts into a single and official location. 26 The new Mayakovsky Museum, located in the flat he had shared with the Briks, was placed under government control and declared the central base for the new "Mayakovsky editorial commission" that was preparing the poet's collected works and that oversaw the archive. 27 State control over the creation and continued existence of a Mayakovsky commentary depended on the 1938 state directive. The directive meant that the state could regulate and suppress not only existing texts, but also future production and verification of published memoirs and other sources of "fact." In 1938, the Mayakovsky Museum began to record memoirs of Mayakovsky and began soliciting any reminiscences or memories that citizens had of the poet. The museum staff's effort to collect memories and primary source documents was supported by many former friends and colleagues of Mayakovsky, and reveals a complex set of motivations. It can be seen as an attempt to preserve the past and to enable a more complete study of Mayakovsky's work and life. But it was also clearly an effort to fix memories and experiences of Mayakovsky in state institutions and authoritative textual forms that could be processed, controlled, cited, or hidden. Control over Mayakovsky's archive, and memoirs in particular, was what ultimately made possible the Mayakovsky celebration that was held in April 1940. In January, an official party directive established a committee to oversee preparations for a celebration to mark the tenth anniversary of Mayakovsky's death. 28 The Mayakovsky celebration would involve both the mass population and the literary community in creating Mayakovsky's new "classic" image.
Like the Pushkin celebration of 1937, Stalin's 1935 statement about Mayakovsky and the April 1940 celebration was in part meant to oppose the Russian emigration by opposing their promotion of Russian "high" culture with a Soviet "high" culture. 29 Nor was the 1940 jubilee an isolated or unique event. Celebrations and festivals so permeated this period that several scholars have applied the term "celebration culture" to the Soviet culture of the 1930s; massive public commemorations marked great cultural, scientific, and exploratory achievements (PC, 1-7). Among these celebrations, state-sponsored anniversary celebrations for "Soviet" authors, literary jubilees, were new and prominent developments in the cultural life of this period. 30 Most of them honored nineteenth-century Russian authors, but some celebrated great authors of "world" (invariably European) literature. However, even these were meant to demonstrate the Soviet people's great cultural advancement and their status as the true heirs of the best cultural traditions. 31 The largest and most studied of these celebrations, the Pushkin celebration, stretched into a whole year of events, texts, and commemorations for the entire nation. 32
The Mayakovsky celebration reinforced for writers the specific options that Stalin's statement had implied. Other literary jubilees of this period presented a similar set of alternatives: in 1937 vicious newspaper reports of trials and "enemies" alternated with warm, joyous articles about Pushkin and the celebration. Marcus Levitt has seen this phenomenon in the Soviet press as a contrast between negative and positive ideals for the new Soviet man. 33 The alternation of opposing images, however, seems more specifically oriented towards writers and critics. It reinforced popular suspicion and distrust of intellectuals while subjugating the intelligentsia into a state controlled literary event. Celebrating Pushkin alongside the purges demonstrated the alternatives presented to the literary intelligentsia: the potential for writers to be either "enemies" or "heroes" of the state. This contrast would become a major theme structuring the Mayakovsky celebration.
In appropriating the literary celebration to create the new image of the Soviet poet, the State adopted an institution with a cultural tradition in Imperial Russia. Since the 1880 Pushkin celebration, the literary jubilee had been an institution in which, by gathering to celebrate a literary classic, the intelligentsia affirmed its own cultural unity and liberal values. Previous scholars have interpreted these celebrations as an incarnation of a cultural "middle ground," a free neutral zone in which members of the intelligentsia could express themselves and affirm their group identity. 34 This ideal of the celebration continued even during the Imperial government's 1899 Pushkin anniversary jubilee. In 1899, though many intellectuals abstained from the state-sponsored events in protest, they held their own "private" celebrations to express the anniversary's meaning for them. 35 In the 1930s, the Soviet government, in sponsoring these literary celebrations, intentionally evoked the traditional role of the celebration as a forum for "free" intellectual discourse while controlling all aspects of publishing and other events. Soviet jubilees, unlike previous celebrations, combined the rhetoric of free intellectual debate with total centralized organization and censorship. In the 1930s, unlike the 1880s, the mass media could saturate the general population (many of whom were newly literate) with commemorative programs and texts. Because the party controlled all aspects of literary production and cultural activity, it was possible to coordinate print genres with jubilee events such as exhibits and conferences.
Scholars of Russian literary celebrations have usually treated them either as occasions for rhetoric or as temporally limited public events. 36 However, in conceptualizing the Soviet literary celebrations of the 1930s, it is difficult to separate texts from events or to distinguish the newspaper coverage of the jubilee from the jubilee itself. Establishing temporal limits for the celebration also becomes difficult: the 1937 Pushkin celebration stretched into a year-long event (often referred to as the "Pushkin Year") that intensified on Pushkin's death anniversary, but was not limited to it. Similarly, newspapers blurred the distinction between reports on preparations and reports on the actual jubilee exhibits and conferences. Newspapers reported on planning for conferences, exhibits, and other events and texts to be produced for the celebration. Several newspaper and journal articles from 1937 instruct editors and journalists to frequently publish information about jubilee preparations, as well as informational notes and letters from readers, in order to raise expectations while reinforcing the national character of the event. 37 On the anniversary date, newspapers typically produced a multigeneric litstranitsa that included criticism, biography, poetry, and visual images; after the anniversary date newspaper articles described and evaluated the events and speeches of the celebration. In this way, they prepared readers for the celebration day, and then interpreted the events after the fact.
Defining a boundary between text and event in this period is all the more difficult because newspaper layouts produced for the jubilee combined features associated with both public exhibit and private reading. Published literary pages displayed a multigeneric "exhibit" of the author on or near the author's anniversary. Because the literary pages published for the Mayakovsky celebration came out on or near the anniversary of his death (April 14), they appeared within the strictest temporal boundaries of the jubilee; moreover, they were regulated as tightly as other aspects of the celebration. Like exhibitions, they included memoirs, poems, and photographs. However, these were designed for private reading rather than public viewing. At the same time, a volume of photographs and portraits published in 1940 was designed to be used as a permanent, portable "exhibit" of Mayakovsky in a public setting such as a worker's club or a classroom. 38 Periodicals distributed plans for jubilee participants to follow in organizing events, as well as artistic texts. For all these reasons, Soviet celebrations must be examined as both print and event. Previous scholars have pointed out that Russian literary jubilees have always been cultural institutions with a specific social function, rather than just occasions for literary criticism or praise ("GR," 179-80). The Soviet celebrations were all-encompassing cultural institutions which penetrated all aspects of the mass media and cultural life. Mayakovsky's canonization was accomplished not through fiat, but through this institution that created his new symbolic and cultural value.
In his study of the "Gogol Days," Moeller-Sally applies a typology taken from Don Handelman's Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events to the institution of the literary celebration (ibid.). Handelman separates public events into three types: events that model, events of presentation, and events of representation. 39 Events that model are transformative and goal oriented, intended to produce a qualitative change in the real world. Events of presentation reflect a uniform vision of the social order and present no conflicting perspectives, creating their effect through an interaction between the event and the social order. Events of representation are more flexible, containing multiple perspectives that don't challenge the social order but "represent" conflicts or confrontations that exist within the social order (MM, 40-9). Moeller-Sally suggests that pre-revolutionary Russian literary jubilees mainly combine events of presentation and those of representation ("GR," 179-80). Applied to Soviet literary celebrations of the 1930s, this typology demonstrates the shift in jubilee function in this period. Soviet jubilees of the 1930s were transformative, and primarily combined aspects of Handelman's "events that model" and "events of presentation." In this period, Soviet literature was designed to act upon readers, making them into good Soviet citizens, rather than simply providing reading material (MSR, 2). The Soviet jubilee participant, like the reader, was an object rather than a recipient; the jubilee sought to transform him or her into a Soviet citizen who acknowledged the values and persona promoted in the name of the classic poet. 40 Explicit dissent and acknowledged diversity of opinion were not part of the jubilee events in the 1930s. They displayed a unified view of the social order and the literary classics. Through various participatory events and texts, they were to shape the public into Soviet citizens and writers into servants of the state. 41
Pre-revolutionary literary celebrations have been discussed as a means to promote national identity. 42 Strictly speaking though, literary celebrations in general support cultural unity and identity, not strictly political identity. This is what made them so useful to the Soviet state. The 1930s literary celebrations promoted cultural identity and unity based on the Russian literary tradition. 43 The ideals promoted by celebrations, particularly those for poets, joined the communal and personal aspects of being "cultured." In part they linked the new concept of "culturedness" (kul'turnost') that was promoted in this period with what Jeffrey Brooks has called "culturism." The concept of "culturedness" in the 1930s encompassed cultural literacy, hygiene, and political consciousness. As promoted by the State, this new concept of "culturedness" was meant to encourage a revaluation of education and behavior, hygiene, and material goods previously considered suspect. 44 Rather than nationalism, which promotes unity based on the nation-state, culturism promotes the idea that a certain culture unifies, or should unify, all the people. 45 Though Brooks describes culturism as the "attitude" that educated classes held towards the lower classes, culturism also represented the attitude that newly educated people held towards their own cultural advancement. Like pre-revolutionary celebrations, 1930s literary jubilees expressed culturism; however, they expressed a culturism that was largely state controlled. The rhetoric of the celebrations promoted the poet and the event itself as a source of both "culturedness" and culturism. The Soviet "classic" poet thus embodied and enabled both personal achievement and cultural unity.
The literary jubilees of the late 1930s expressed the government's first definitive approach to the Russian literary heritage; it finally resolved a debate over the literary heritage that had raged through the 1920s. Many writers, critics, and politicians had regarded the classics as a potentially dangerous product of bourgeois culture, an inheritance that was inherently suspect. Others declared that, like property, the classics should be distributed to the working class; moreover, they argued that the classics should serve as stylistic models for the new Soviet literature. The State had adopted no definite position in this debate. 46 In the 1930s, state-approved criticism and political rhetoric began to describe Pushkin and other pre-revolutionary authors as forefathers of Soviet culture, progressive minds, and spiritual contemporaries of Soviet life (RC, 113). This new attitude was not so much to promote the classics as stylistic models for Socialist Realism as to historicize Soviet literature as the natural final development of the Russian literary tradition. Vladimir Paperny has discussed a similar movement towards historical continuity and standardization in the architecture of this period: "The basic problem of architecture becomes [in the 1930s] the assimilation of the heritage." 47 Stalinist culture was portrayed as the end development of all culture, the goal towards which all history had been evolving. The 1940 Mayakovsky celebration in particular expressed this idea in the literary sphere. The Mayakovsky jubilee was the first celebration for a Soviet author's death anniversary and the first jubilee for a Soviet-era poet. As such, it helped to historicize the first decade of Soviet rule, making this period a part of "history" and imagining Mayakovsky as belonging to the literary canon, thus breaking his very real ties to living writers and to continuing literary debates. Mayakovsky's canonization, then, was not only about creating a state "classic" poet as a mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda; it legitimized Soviet cultural and literary history. The Pushkin celebration had symbolized and expressly promoted a new unified narrative of Soviet poetry as a single line of development from Pushkin. In 1940 jubilee rhetoric, Mayakovsky represents the final flowering of Soviet literature, the last stage that completes the symbolic development of Soviet literature and justifies its origins. By historicizing Mayakovsky, the 1940 jubilee confirms the finality of this stage.
By sponsoring official literary celebrations, the State took over the Russian intelligentsia's traditional use of literary anniversaries. Jubilee celebrations in the pre-revolutionary modernist period had been an important means by which Russian Symbolist and Acmeist poets, in particular, defined their "mythological chronology." By celebrating Pushkin, they had affirmed the parallels between the "Silver" and "Golden" ages of Russian culture, and declared Pushkin as their own literary "father." 48 Soviet celebrations of the 1930s similarly used the jubilee to express a correspondence between historical periods: the "Golden Age" of Pushkin and the era of Stalin. Numerous essays published for the Pushkin celebration portrayed the Soviet people as Pushkin's true contemporaries, the fulfillment of his prophecy (PC, 118). See, for example, how Ivan Luppol portrays Pushkin as a godlike re, emphasizing his all-seeing gaze, a feature normally attributed to Stalin:
And this man—because he was a man—looks at us today with his intelligent, penetrating eyes. We feel his gaze on us and are proud of it. And we say to him: Pushkin, your words:
And at the entrance to the tomb
Let a young life play . . .
have come to pass. At the grave of the great Russian poet a young, joyous socialist life is playing. 49
In Luppol's formulation, Pushkin thus not only envisions the Soviet future, but also remains alive in some eternal realm, watching over the Soviet people as Stalin does. 50 The Pushkin celebration effectively created a new "mythological coordination" which aligned the Stalinist 1930s with the "Golden Age," appropriating for the state the earlier self-mythology of the Russian intelligentsia. 51 The Mayakovsky jubilee drew on this parallel by suggesting that Mayakovsky's historical position was parallel to Pushkin's: just as Pushkin was the source of the Russian literary tradition, Mayakovsky embodied the new Soviet literature. Articles stressed Mayakovsky's role as the "Sun of Soviet Poetry," heir to the Pushkinian tradition. 52 The Mayakovsky jubilee developed and affirmed the parallel historical roles created for the two poets in critical articles published for the 1937 Pushkin celebration. 53
By participating in the Literary celebrations of the 1930s, the population could express its Soviet cultural literacy and could learn the correct forms for praising the Soviet classics. The literary jubilees proclaimed the unity of Soviet peoples in celebrating classic authors, while their very existence reinforced the implicit hierarchy that made the Russian cultural tradition primary in Soviet culture. 54 In theory, Soviet cultural unity was supposed to be expressed by staging similar literary celebrations for authors of the "brother republics," but their equivalency was belied by the massive scale of the Pushkin celebration. In fact, despite their rhetoric, Soviet jubilees expressed the supremacy of the Russian culture in two ways: first through the larger amount of resources devoted to Russian authors like Pushkin and Mayakovsky, and second by making a Russian cultural institution, the literary jubilee, the basis for creating and affirming cultural value. An unsigned piece of propaganda, published for the Lermontov celebration in 1939, presents the official symbolism of the literary celebrations, tying them to the 1939 Soviet invasion of western Ukraine and Byelorussia:
All the peoples of the Soviet Union ceremonially commemorate the great Russian poet. . . . The cultural holiday dedicated to Lermontov will enter the ranks of the cultural holidays dedicated to poets and poetic works of other peoples of the USSR: [Taras] Shevchenko, [Shota] Rustaveli, [Ilias' Lusif Gandzhevi] Nizami. . . . This "roll-call" of great names reveals with obvious conviction the brotherly friendship of all the Soviet peoples and their great cultural mission. . . . We will reveal for our brothers, freed by the valorous Red army from the overlord's yoke in western Ukraine and western Byelorussia a path to all the cultural riches of modernity and the cultural heritage of the past. 55
These Soviet literary celebrations presented a cultural tradition not tied to language or ethnicity, but to the Soviet State and to Soviet communist doctrine. Celebrations demonstrated Soviet cultural unity by showing how the other republics embraced Russian culture.
The events and texts of the 1940 celebration promoted Mayakovsky as the foundation for the Soviet culture that unified the national literatures of the republics. Jubilee essays and memoirs stressed Mayakovsky's own active role in unifying the republics during his extensive travels across the Soviet Union and abroad, through his family history (like Stalin, he was born in Georgia), and through his attention to poets of other nationalities. 56 The Mayakovsky celebration thus created a vision of Soviet cultural identity that was synchronically bound by the different Soviet peoples and diachronically bound to the Russian literary and cultural tradition.
Juxtaposing the 1937 Pushkin jubilee with the 1940 Mayakovsky celebration, one can see how the latter demonstrated the supposedly increased tempo of historical progress in Stalinist society. A main theme of the Pushkin jubilee of 1937 was the gulf between pre- and post-revolutionary reality: the Pushkin celebration supposedly expressed a sincere popular adoration of the poet that had been impossible in the Imperial period. In contrast, the Mayakovsky celebration marked a ten-year period entirely within the Stalin era. The celebration was an occasion to note that Soviet life had in this period fulfilled Mayakovsky's hopes and dreams. During the Mayakovsky celebration's commemorative evening held in the Bolshoi Theater Alexander Fadeev began his talk by affirming the great transformation of Soviet life since 1930: "In this time socialism has been built in our country." 57 It is clear that the celebration did not merely revise the public's image of Mayakovsky or promote a politicized interpretation of the poet, though these were certainly important goals of its organizers. As a celebration of Soviet achievement, it portrayed authors and literary accomplishments with the same model of progress that characterized other spheres of Soviet society. By the fact of its existence, the 1940 celebration expressed a new Soviet poetic ideal, portraying Mayakovsky as the ultimate merger of literary and political advancement.
Levitt has said that the literary jubilees of the 1930s represented that tradition's complete transformation into a state ideological tool, a process that had begun with the Imperial Pushkin celebration of 1899 (RLP, 158-64). Though he suggests that the 1937 Pushkin celebration was the culmination of this process, the transformation was most fully expressed in the Mayakovsky celebration of April 1940. Unlike the Pushkin celebration, the Mayakovsky celebration allowed none of the poet's works to escape from the language of Soviet ideology. Slogans and excerpts from Mayakovsky's most politically engaged Soviet works were the standard fare, while many of his pre-revolutionary poems, particularly ones in which the poet's biographical persona predominated, were de-emphasized and rarely republished in popular editions. Texts printed for the celebration repeated Stalin's comment about Mayakovsky like a mantra; the quotation's prominent place in jubilee displays reminded all that the celebration's forms, texts, and events were to be seen as an incarnation of Stalin's words. Although everyone knew the source of the "best, most talented" formulation, this phrase was always explicitly attributed to Stalin in jubilee articles, banners, displays, and books. The prominent linking of Stalin with literary value is somewhat unusual, in fact: Friedberg has found that certain accepted authorities (such as Lenin and Nikolai Chernyshevsky) were commonly cited in the 1930s to settle arguments and support interpretations of the classics; Stalin, however, was never one of these unquestionable authorities (RC, 117). By contrast, in 1940 Stalin was the primary authority supporting Mayakovsky's cultural and literary value. The explicit references to his authority throughout the celebration show the greater degree of political significance and intimidation expressed in the canonization of Mayakovsky and reinforce the implication that the jubilee was a direct expression of Stalin's will.
As Alekseeva has noted, "the tenth anniversary of Mayakovsky's death became a pretext for the mass inculcation of the 'necessary' Mayakovsky into social consciousness" ("DLS," 179). The 1940 celebration simultaneously addressed the masses' preconceptions about Mayakovsky and enlisted them and the intelligentsia in composing a state-approved "commentary" that would frame Mayakovsky for future readers. The Mayakovsky jubilee was an important publishing and cultural event, spawning three compilation volumes, hundreds of articles and memoirs, symphonies, film scripts, biographical fiction, poems, anthologies, teaching plans, portraits, and other texts and events. 58 New collections of Mayakovsky's work appeared, including a large one-volume edition designed for mass consumption. As in the Pushkin jubilee, readings, exhibits, amateur and professional conferences, and commemorative evenings were held all over the Soviet Union. The commemorative evening held at the Bolshoi Theater was attended by political and literary dignitaries and reported on in all of the major papers. Fadeev's speech at this event was published as a separate booklet in 50,000 copies. Museums and libraries created Mayakovsky exhibits for their patrons and sponsored amateur conferences and readings. 59 A documentary film, with a script written by O. Brik, was shown at jubilee evenings and lectures, while the papers touted an artistic film about Mayakovsky in the works. 60 Commemorative Mayakovsky texts and events saturated the anniversary on 14 April 1940 and continued throughout the year.
Many of the materials published for the celebration centered, as literary jubilees usually did, on reinventing the cultural myths of the poet's person. Library and education magazines debated how best to introduce Mayakovsky to various types of readers. 61 In particular, the celebration seemed to require the publication of numerous "factual" accounts of Mayakovsky's life for the general reader. Poetry praising Mayakovsky in newspaper litstranitsy and jubilee volumes also granted him "classic" status by describing him as a literary interlocutor for both amateur and professional poets. Many poems were published and performed for the celebration; the most prominent was by Mayakovsky's friend, the poet Nikolai Aseev, whose long poem Mayakovsky Begins (Maiakovskii nachinaetsia [1940]) won the first Stalin prize for poetry in 1941. The 1940 anniversary produced the first comprehensive body of texts (such as homage poetry) and events (such as exhibits and school theatricals) that supported Mayakovsky's status as a literary classic of Soviet culture. In promoting these types of texts in 1940, critics affirmed the hierarchy of genres composing the Mayakovsky commentary. They repeatedly asserted that personal observations, the "fact" of memoirs, had to be subordinated to the "truth" of formulaic biographical narrative that would define Mayakovsky for future generations. Texts like Victor Shklovsky's O Maiakorskom (About Mayakovsky, published in English as Mayakovsky and His Circle) were printed in tiny runs of 5,000 and were savaged in reviews for their "incorrect biographical method" (in Shklovsky's case this referred to the indeterminate genre and personal content of his memoiristic/autobiographical/artistic work). Formulaic third-person narratives of Mayakovsky's evolution into a great Soviet poet were published in huge printings of 100,000 copies. Of course, the content of published texts about Mayakovsky was censored and negative features were not allowed to appear.
Unlike contemporary American commemorations of literary anniversaries, the Mayakovsky jubilee celebration was to be an event not just for academia but for everyone. 62 General readers experienced the jubilee through commemorative newspaper litstranitsy that functioned as miniature exhibits for the mass reader, combining photos, sketches, critical articles, memoirs, and poetry in a commemorative layout. The public was invited to take part in amateur reading circles, attend a lecture series, and write verse or essays for the local newspapers. In other words, the public participated in the celebration not only as an audience but also as writers and scholars. In addition to the scholarly memoirs written by Mayakovsky's literary colleagues, popular memoirs portrayed Mayakovsky from the perspective of the average audience member at one of his performances, or depicted a chance meeting with the poet. Verses by amateur writers and children were published in the jubilee edition of the newspapers. The celebration thus demanded at least the image of active participation.
Soviet scholarship on the literary jubilees of the 1930s, not surprisingly, reads them as evidence that the masses had made the literary heritage and its values their own. In the press, the Mayakovsky celebration was described—as the Pushkin celebration had been—as evidence of the Soviet people's cultural literacy and emotional attachment to the poet. 63 The celebration supposedly expressed the people's "burning love for the best, most talented poet of our epoch." 64 Both contemporaries and later Soviet scholars described these events as spontaneous manifestations of Soviet unity, humanism, and love. The following interpretation is typical:
With great love the workers marked these jubilees dedicated to the producers of patriotic literature: Chernyshevsky, [Nikolai] Gogol, [Leo] Tolstoy, [Mikhail] Lermontov, [Nikolai] Nekrasov, the classic of Azerbaidzhani literature M[irza-Fatali] Akhundov. . . . The measures taken bore witness to the Soviet people's great mastery of the spiritual values of the classical heritage. In reality the official ceremonies turned into mass holidays of the multi-national Soviet culture. 65
Of course, these celebrations were not spontaneous, but state-sponsored and controlled. Moreover, the passivity of the participants in these celebrations was a constant problem for the organizers. 66 Though official rhetoric portrayed them as spontaneous manifestations of popular love for culture, the explicit didacticism of the celebrations indicated that the cultural level of the people was not as high as was desired. Speeches at the Pushkin celebration, while interpreting the jubilee as proof of the "dawn of Soviet culture" were typical in citing its didactic goals:
Undoubtedly the Pushkin festivities themselves, having unfolded into such a grandiose cultural parade on the basis of the huge victories of socialism in our country, are having and will have the most beneficial effects on the further development of the culture of the numerous peoples populating the Soviet Union. 67
The rhetoric that portrayed jubilees as spontaneous expressions of emotion was contradicted by these stated hopes and by the explicitly didactic aims of the organizers. Similar goals were espoused during the Mayakovsky celebration, which not only taught a public unfamiliar with his work, but proclaimed Mayakovsky's bond with the people while simultaneously countering popular preconceptions about the poet. Mayakovsky was to be presented as "national/popular" (narodnyi) and "comprehensible" (poniatnyi). Ultimately, therefore, the celebration sought the participation of the mass population in order to control their exposure to Mayakovsky and to teach them to associate the "Soviet classic" with his person and reputation. 68
During the 1940 jubilee, Soviet citizens engaged Mayakovsky's newly ideologized biography, works, and literary significance through reading, but also through participating in events. Amateur conferences and gatherings of factory reading-circles were organized by party operatives who would be sure to be politically correct. The jubilee not only promoted the proper interpretations of Mayakovsky's life and works, it created the image of a nationwide public participation in the affirmation of its themes. For example, commemorative issues of magazines and newspapers published numerous "popular" voices asserting Mayakovsky's value for the Soviet people. Memoir sketches and testimonials from citizens were published in literary journals, popular journals, and national and provincial newspapers. "The Living Mayakovsky," an article published in the journal Literaturnoe Obozrenie exemplifies how critics could use "popular" memoirs to create a new "popular" discourse about Mayakovsky to counter the masses' preconceptions. The article's author, Oleg Leonidov, published a mosaic of excerpts from memoirs that appeared in provincial newspapers, explaining how they proved Mayakovsky was a kind, decent man (instead of a vulgar bohemian), who assisted other poets and wrote comprehensible verses that expressed the soul of the nation. 69 Leonidov's use of "popular" memoir sketches to make these points in a literary magazine demonstrates how images of popular involvement in the celebration were used to create the new Mayakovsky myth; they were transformed into authoritative voices that rivaled those of Mayakovsky's former friends and colleagues. These themes were sounded directly in slogans, criticism, and editorial articles; however, artistic and documentary genres played an equally important role in revising the image of Mayakovsky. Published jubilee poems, anecdotes, and memoirs, often by "average" people, created images of personal interactions with the great poet.
The 1940 Mayakovsky celebration occasioned great efforts by librarians, teachers, and others to organize exposure to Mayakovsky and to certain of his works. Instructions for librarians, published in Krasnyi Bibliotekar' [Red Librarian], outlined in detail the ways local librarians should propagandize Mayakovsky. 70 It was their responsibility to organize exhibits and amateur conferences, advise patrons, collect responses, and recommend poetry and criticism. Like the 1937 Pushkin celebration, the Mayakovsky jubilee included events at collective farms, local libraries, reading rooms, and factories. Special "Mayakovsky" features—including testimonials, letters, verses, biographies, and essays—were published not only in literary magazines, but also in professional and popular periodicals. 71 Mayakovsky's "comprehensibility," in particular, was created not only through general statements in criticism and editorials about his poetry, but also through presentations of and by "real" people who worked to overcome their initial difficulties in understanding his verse. Popular memoirs and testimonials cited real-life incidents that proved Mayakovsky was comprehensible to those who learned to read his work properly. They often stressed his role as a teacher on his lecture tours. In the context of the jubilee, proper performance indicated comprehension: being able to read Mayakovsky's work well meant that one understood it. 72 The 1940 jubilee not only dictated the correct interpretation of Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky is comprehensible), but also, through incorporating "popular" voices and amateur literary productions, modeled a pattern of public response to Mayakovsky's poetry. This kind of model allowed jubilee organizers to acknowledge the average reader's difficulty in understanding the poetry while portraying comprehension as the ultimate result of reading aloud. This ideal of comprehension downplayed the importance of understanding the historical or poetic context of the poems themselves, stressing instead the public participation in events such as amateur conferences and readings arranged for the celebration. In this way, models of reading promoted in 1940 discouraged investigation of Mayakovsky's Futurist poetics, his polemics with other literary factions, his historical and poetic influences and allusions, or his use of autobiographical content. This approach to Mayakovsky's work separated the poet from the simultaneous repression of avant-garde and "formalist" poetry and the persecution of his friends and colleagues. This model of reading allowed the poet to be recontextualized into the new "realist" canon of Soviet poetry, as an heir to Pushkin.
The jubilee celebration's images and texts taught readers not only to interpret Mayakovsky as a Soviet political poet, but also to regard him as a heroic re, encouraging them to read literature and literary res with the same framework applied to other spheres of cultural life. 73 The 1940 celebration promoted and circulated Mayakovsky as a symbol of Soviet achievements in literature equal to the industrial achievements touted in the Soviet press. To create Mayakovsky's new heroic Soviet image, many authors developed a new biography of Mayakovsky for the general reader, one that identified communist ideals in even his early work. These specific interpretation of Mayakovsky's life and works stressed his story as a model for common readers, a heroic narrative of Socialist Realism. 74 In the 1930s, numerous heroic biographies of notable people were published, many of them written according to a standard pattern, so that distinctions between fiction and biography began to disappear (SN, 122-3). Several structural components of the Socialist Realist Novel can be discerned in the jubilee images of Mayakovsky. First, Socialist Realist novels often create for the hero a surrogate "family" to replace the hero's natural family. 75 Menzel has stressed the portrayal of Mayakovsky's idyllic childhood family in works such as Kal'ma's biography for young people, Great Steps (Bol'shie shagi [1940]). However, in Kal'ma's and other jubilee biographies, Mayakovsky's revolutionary work and "family" become more prominent than his real family, or his literary cohorts. 76 Certainly the family that Mayakovsky himself had defined as an adult in his suicide note was downplayed or eliminated in the official jubilee "commentary." 77 The official version of Mayakovsky's biography also reflects the second pattern that Clark identified as belonging to the Socialist Realist hero: the naïve, spontaneous protagonist who gradually develops Soviet consciousness and rationality. The jubilee Mayakovsky, like the Socialist Realist hero, relied on a mentor, meetings with whom advance political consciousness. For Mayakovsky, Gorky becomes this mentor. 78 This is apparent in numerous publications, such as the memoirs of Gorky's second wife Maria Andreeva, which were published in the 13 April 1940 issue of Pravda. Andreeva glowingly describes Gorky's recognition of the young Mayakovsky's talent and his work to help the young poet publish; she also dwells on Mayakovsky's childlike personality and his loving respect for Gorky. 79 The jubilee thus recreated Mayakovsky as a Soviet classic in part by transferring the plots of Socialist Realism, and specifically the narrative of heroic development onto Mayakovsky and into the literary canon.
It is true that literary celebrations were concentrated in urban centers and did not necessarily penetrate life in the countryside. Their effect on the rural population, if any, is unclear. 80 However, the 1940 Mayakovsky celebration did attempt to reach and involve the general reader; moreover, the portrayal of the celebration's effect on the general reader was itself a major goal. Perhaps the state promoted Mayakovsky not to cultivate a real love for his poetry, but to change the popular connotations that his name carried. Even if it did not love Mayakovsky or read his work after the jubilee, the general population would no longer think of him as only an incomprehensible Futurist. Readers would associate certain important Soviet phrases and roles with him and would interpret him in as a part of a literary tradition that they should value and celebrate. Popular involvement (and the description of it in newspapers and journals) would keep the intelligentsia from owning the celebration, while teaching the public to associate the forms of the literary celebration with Soviet culture.
In considering professional writers' participation in the 1940 Mayakovsky celebration, it is important to remember that Stalin had defined opposition and indifference to the poet as a crime against the state. Menzel has concluded that fear of punishment for this new "crime" colors all writings about Mayakovsky after 1935. 81 Although it is true that this definition of a new "crime" particularly intimidated and threatened writers, scholarship on Mayakovsky after 1935 was motivated by a complex mix of social and psychological factors that are hard to separate. These included fear of persecution, desire to publish, official compulsion, political and/or professional opportunism, and sincere regard for Mayakovsky's work. Because the official pronouncement on Mayakovsky indicated the offense to be avoided it is difficult to separate the fear generated by Stalin's statement from the atmosphere of fear that permeated all literary culture in the late 1930s.
Mayakovsky was perhaps able to save some individuals as well. Stalin reportedly crossed Lili Brik's name off a list of arrestees, saying, "We won't touch Mayakovsky's wife [sic]". 82 Many writers with connections to Mayakovsky published memoirs and articles about him for the rest of their careers. 83 It is quite possible that ties to Mayakovsky protected Vasilii Kamensky, Vladimir Pertsov, Shklovsky, and other writers at least to some extent during the Stalin era. The 1940 celebration occasioned many sincere works and presentations by former friends and colleagues who willingly participated in the festivities. 84 Thus, Stalin's comments may have allowed some writers to remain professionally active to the extent that their ties with the poet may have sheltered them or provided an outlet for their creative activity. Mayakovsky's new Soviet value, it seems, could be more than a symbol of state ideology; for some it could provide a measure of shelter or creativity.
Although state control over all aspects of the celebration means that Levitt's idea of a free neutral zone cannot apply to the Stalin period, it is clear that the "special cultural space" of the 1930s celebrations did present some opportunities for individual expression and for disagreement within (though not outside of) official celebration discourse (PC, 115). Much valuable Mayakovsky scholarship was published in 1940, as well as personal and sincere reflections on Mayakovsky and his place in Soviet literature. However, the celebration itself both reinforced the state's control over cultural value and contributed to the dissolution of the intelligentsia as a separate group. The Mayakovsky celebration merged literary and political value in the re of Mayakovsky, whose poetic development was rewritten into a political evolution starting in his childhood. In the 1930s Stalin had begun to use the term "intelligentsia" to include party elite as well as intellectuals. 85 In the 1940 jubilee, the state continued to dissolve the intelligentsia while taking its authority to promote literary classics and determine literary value. The jubilee events for factory workers, amateur scholars, and schoolchildren, as well as the popular responses to Mayakovsky published in the press, diluted the specific meanings that could be attached to the celebration by the literary community.
Despite the imposition of state ideology, the Soviet jubilees did provide opportunities to discuss literature that was not written in the Socialist Realist mode. In the 1937 Pushkin celebration, Pushkin at least could present a subject for textual analysis that was free from Soviet ideology. Moreover, involvement in the jubilee enabled the writers to at least maintain contact with a readership, sustaining the memory of their names and perhaps their other works. A similar motivation probably propelled the former friends and colleagues of Mayakovsky. Many who wrote about Mayakovsky for the celebration pushed the boundaries of acceptable jubilee literature. Shklovsky's About Mayakovsky (O Maiakovskom) and Kamensky's Life with Mayakovsky (Zhizn' s Maiakovskim) both use the occasion of the celebration to publish jubilee texts grounded in their personal relationship with the poet. 86 In focusing on personal relationships in Mayakovsky's artistic, rather than political beginnings, they tried to situate their ideal of the "true" Mayakovsky within the boundaries of jubilee scholarship. Ambiguous participation in the 1930s literary celebrations has been acknowledged by Petrone, who has stressed the possibilities for unorthodox expression inherent in what she terms "celebration discourse," the literary, visual, and musical expressions dealing with the celebrations (PC, 7-8). Petrone's concept of "celebration discourse" highlights the potential for Aesopian language and multiple meanings in even state approved texts. The Russian tradition of "Aesopian language" permeated many published texts in the Stalin Era. Forms of Russian Aesopian language developed by writers through the years include hidden allusions, secret irony, allegories, and mockery disguised as overly effusive praise. 87 The very rigidity and ritualistic nature of public discourse may have enabled more Aesopian language and multiple meanings than would have been possible in a more individualized public sphere (SN, 12-3). Writers could use Aesopian language in the 1937 Pushkin celebration to incorporate a variety of political and personal themes into even sanctioned jubilee texts and rhetoric (PC, 141-8). Portraits of Pushkin as a persecuted poet who advocated freedom, for example, conformed to the official Soviet interpretation of Pushkin as a poet persecuted by a reactionary Tsarist regime, while also suggesting contemporary situations of repression that could not be mentioned directly. 88 These ambiguities in rhetoric demonstrate that the intelligentsia's participation in the Mayakovsky celebration did not simply mean conformity. Their texts could raise similarly suggestive criticisms while seemingly expressing the correct attitude towards the Soviet "classic." One memoir, published in Literaturnyi Sovremennik by Rita Rait, begins with what seems to be a general reference to the passage of time (a conventional opening for a memoir): "Time, as is well known, wipes away penciled notations, eats up ink, yellows photographs with years, breaks old letters along the folds, and burns shreds of diaries in the stove" [emphasis added]. 89 The memoirist's reference to time's disintegrating effect on words and photographs ends on an action that does not naturally result from the passage of time: the burning of diaries. This phrase would no doubt evoke the burning of letters, diaries, and other papers during the purges to destroy evidence that might be found and used against an arrested person or his/her friends by the secret police. The jubilee memoir, it seems, could allude to the present in its framing of the past, referring indirectly to Stalin's purges and their effect on literary texts. The institution of the literary celebration could be a forum for politically ambiguous or subversive allusions not only in jubilee texts, but also in performances and public settings. Nadezhda Mandelstam remembers the private meanings shared by Osip Mandelstam and the director Yakhontov in Voronezh, as Yakhontov performed a one-man show he had created about Mayakovsky and Pushkin:
In a turn entitled "Traveling Poets" he [Yakhontov] read passages from Pushkin's "Journey to Erzrum" [sic] and from Mayakovsky in such a way as to suggest that poets could travel abroad only under the Soviet regime. The audience reacted with total indifference: nobody then imagined that anybody could travel abroad and as they left at the end of this baffling evening, the only comment they could manage was "That's what comes from living too well." At one point he would recite from Mayakovsky's poem about the "Soviet Passport" and, taking his own identity papers from his pocket, brandish them in front of the audience, looking all the time straight at M. [Osip Mandelstam]. M. took his brand-new papers out of his pocket and they exchanged knowing glances. The authorities would have taken a very poor view of such antics, but they are very literal-minded, and there were no instructions to cover cases of this kind. 90
As sanctioned events with a clearly acceptable purpose, jubilees provided rare opportunities for public gathering and performance of the type N. Mandelstam mentions. In this context Yakhontov's play was able to suggest a private context in a public setting, carrying a special meaning to certain participants. 91 The link between Mayakovsky and Pushkin could also allude to the contemporary persecution of poets in the USSR. Jubilee events and texts could therefore be ambiguous, conveying unsanctioned meanings while seemingly conforming to official political and ideological demands.
By participating in the literary celebrations writers could maintain relationships with a readership, and promote certain roles or ideals of authorship. Anna Akhmatova, for example, after years of enforced silence, managed to perform her verse, "Mayakovsky in 1913," publicly for a Mayakovsky jubilee event held in Leningrad. 92 Furthermore, jubilee writings, while preserving the official Soviet value that their commentary supported, sometimes used themes and narrative forms that called into question the commentary conventions themselves. The most notorious example of this is Shklovsky's About Mayakovsky; Shklovsky violated thematic expectations by discussing Mayakovsky's Futurist period at length and highlighting his connections to Futurism (MR, 174-5). However, he also violated generic expectations by writing a book that could not easily be classified as either "memoir" (a text that could be evaluated as "fact" or personal reminiscence), or "biography" (a genre that in this period required an impersonal narrative voice and formulaic plot). Shklovsky used the jubilee volume about Mayakovsky to actively engage with expectations of jubilee texts, specifically biographies. His book shows how the Mayakovsky jubilee could be made into a forum for challenging the structure of commentary that it sanctioned and created.
Understanding Mayakovsky's canonization as a cultural process clarifies how the ideal of Soviet literature transformed the res of literary modernism. It is all the more important because the mechanisms of the Soviet poetic canon in the 1930s are still poorly understood. The "poet function" of Socialist Realism has yet to be studied in detail. 93 Unlike the prose canon, the Socialist Realist canon for poetry depended on a set of model poets. Critical studies of this canon, however, have approached it as a selection of model texts. The recent resurgence of critical interest in Socialist Realism and Stalinist culture of the 1930s has largely neglected the role of the poet and poetry, focusing instead on the novel as the primary Socialist realist genre. 94 Mayakovsky's canonization demonstrates both the interconnectedness of poetry and prose (as prose narratives were applied to Mayakovsky's own biography) and the uniqueness of poetry and the role of the poet, as opposed to the prose writer, in this period. It is clear from the rhetoric of celebrations devoted to Pushkin and Mayakovsky in the 1930s, as well as the numerous literary and visual representations of the poet in this period, that the poet, not the poem, is the basis for the Socialist Realist poetic canon. This canon was based upon a master narrative of evolution in literary history embodied in a succession of heroic poet-res. Mayakovsky's biography, like Pushkin's, reflected an archetypal biographical narrative that confirmed his status in the canon.
Far from being the "background" for the larger changes in literature of
the 1930s, literary jubilees created the new ideal of the Soviet classic
poet and modeled the ways that the public was meant to interact with and
celebrate the classic poets. The Mayakovsky celebration of 1940 created
the first coherent Soviet commentary on Mayakovsky, and involved both
intellectuals and the public in creating and revising the poet's persona
and legacy. It demonstrates that Mayakovsky's "canonization" must
be understood as more than simply the imposition of state values upon a
dead poet. The state used the jubilee to enlist the literary community
in revising the popular image of Mayakovsky. The "commentary" created
by the jubilee employed both text and event, and used materials for
both specialists and general readers. It promoted a cohesive narrative
biography, character, and genealogy, and it institutionalized conventions
to recreate and support the values these images of the poet contained. The
Mayakovsky celebration of 1940 introduced the formulae that would be
used for Mayakovsky celebrations in subsequent years. On a more basic
level, it established the ways in which the public was meant to interact
with the Soviet classic poet, defining the genres of texts, events,
and languages that would be applied in future decades.
Laura Shear Urbaszewski received her Ph.D. in Russian and Czech literature from the University of Chicago in June 2002; this article is drawn from her dissertation, "Creating the First Classic Poet of Socialist Realism: Mayakovsky as a Subject of 'Celebration Culture' 1935-1940." She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.
1. Boris Pasternak, Liudi i polozheniia. Avtobiograficheskaia Proza. Izbrannye pis'ma, (Moscow: Gud'ial, 1998), 148-9. Available in English as Boris Pasternak, An Essay in Autobiography, trans. Manya Harari (London: Collins and Harvill, 1959). Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the Russian are my own. Transliterations of Russian names and titles follow the Library of Congress system, with the following exception: "Mayakovsky" will be written with the familiar English spelling within the body of the article, but "Maiakovskii" will be retained in bibliographic citations. Other transliterated proper names ending in -ii will be written with a final -y within the body of the article.
2. By "1930s" I refer to the period from 1930 until the Soviet Union entered the war with Germany in spring of 1941, thus encompassing the tenth anniversary of Mayakovsky's death in 1940.
3. Birgit Menzel notes that A. Mekhlis, the head editor of Pravda, attempted to weaken Stalin's statement by removing the superlative. The phrase as reproduced in this issue of Pravda called Mayakovsky "the best, talented poet of our Soviet epoch" ("luchshii, talantlivyi poet nashei sovetskoi epokhi"). In the 17 December issue of Pravda, and in all subsequent citations of this quotation, the superlative "most talented" ("talantliveishii") returns. See Birgit Menzel, V. V. Majakovskij und seine Rezeption in der Sowjetunion l930-54, (Berlin: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1992), 144-5; hereafter abbreviated as MR. On this topic, see also Chantal Sundaram, "Manufacturing Culture: The Soviet State and the Mayakovsky Legend, 1930-1993" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2000), 141; hereafter abbreviated as "MC."
4. "Vladimir Maiakovskii," Pravda, 5 December 1935, 4. Stalin was responding to a private letter from Lili Brik protesting the neglect of Mayakovsky's legacy. Some recent scholars have questioned the extent to which Brik's complaints were justified. Although publishing res and critical articles suggest that Mayakovsky was not as neglected as Brik implied, only certain works were being published in any quantity. For yearly print run tallies, see A. Ezerskaia, "Maiakovskii v bibliotekakh," Krasnyi bibliotekar' 2 : 3-16. This could mean that Brik's letter was a preemptive strike rather than a complaint about present conditions, an act meant to protect the Briks from future persecution. Sundaram has supported this view, and has suggested that the canonization of Mayakovsky was spurred not by Brik's personal pleas so much as by Stalin's need for a poet-Stakhanovite re, a "revolutionary romantic" hero ("MC," 141-3). The Pravda article, however, addresses almost point-for-point the main complaints in Brik's letter. It decries the lack of popular editions of his works, the lack of a museum and library in his former residence, and the removal of his Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Good! from school curriculums. The text of Brik's letter has been published several times in recent years: see Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, comps., Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia: Dokumenty TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b), VChK—OGPU—NKVD o kul'turnoi politike, 1917-1953 (Moscow: Demokratiia, 1999), 270-2, hereafter abbreviated as VKI; Vasilii V. Katanian, Lilia Brik, Vladimir Maiakovskii i drugie muzhchiny, (Moscow: Zakharov, 1998), 104-6; and Galina Katanian, "Azorskie Ostrova," in Raspechatannaia butylka, ed. Vasilii A. and Galina D. Katanian, (Nizhnyi Novgorod: Dekom, 1999), 264-8.
5. Lazar Fleischman interprets Stalin's remark as a great relief for Pasternak, because it removed him from the difficult and dangerous responsibility of being a Soviet poet. See Lazar Fleischman, Boris Pasternak: the Poet and his Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 193. Pasternak's subsequent letter to Stalin supports this interpretation: "Recently . . . I had begun to be suspected of serious artistic power. Now, after you placed Mayakovsky in the first position, this suspicion is lifted from me, and with a light heart I can live and work as before" (VKI, 275). See also Pasternak's poem, "To My Liking is the Obstinate Habit" ("Mne po dushe stroptivyi norov"), in Izvestiia, 1 (January 1936), in which he contrasts the "Steel poet" and another "endlessly small" poet. (For this point, and more on Pasternak's response to Stalin, see MR, 145-6.)
6. See, for example, Edwards Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973) or Patricia Blake, "The Two Deaths of Vladimir Mayakovsky," in Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poems, trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey, ed. Patricia Blake (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 9-50. Both of these works end with melancholy acknowledgments of Mayakovsky's Soviet afterlife and affirmations that this was counter to his wishes and works. Blake's title refers to Pasternak, making her moral perspective clear. Svetlana Boym's "The Death of the Revolutionary Poet" departs from this trend in exploring the myths of the revolutionary poet that Mayakovsky cultivated in his poetry and that proliferated after his death. Boym stresses the recurring need for critics to uncover the "real" Mayakovsky under the Soviet façade but she is not concerned with the concrete cultural mechanisms of canonization. See Svetlana Boym, "The Death of the Revolutionary Poet," in Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 119-90.
7. "MC," 266-7. See, for example, Valentin Skoriatin, Taina gibeli Vladimira Maiakovskogo: novaia versiia tragicheskikh sobytii, osnovannaia na poslednikh nakhodkakh v sekretnykh archivakh, [The Secret of the Death of Vladimir Mayakovsky: A New Version of the Tragic Events, Based on Recent Findings in Secret Archives] (Moscow: Zvonnitsa-MG, 1998). In a controversial finding Skoriatin concludes that Mayakovsky was murdered by the Soviet secret police. See also the recent popular biographies of Mayakovsky by A. Mikhailov: Tochka puli v kontse [The Full Stop of a Bullet at the End] (Moscow: Planeta, 1997) and Zhizn' Maiakovskogo: Ia svoe zemnoe ne dozhil [The Life of Mayakovsky: I Haven't Lived out My Earthly] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2001). See also the infamous book by Yuri Karabchievskii, Voskresenie Maiakovskogo [The Resurrection of Mayakovsky] (Munich: Strana i mir, 1985). Numerous articles published by Vladimir Diadichev take a very negative view of the Briks (occasionally veering into potential anti-Semitism or personal attack). See for example Vladimir Diadichev, "Maiakovskii: zhizn' posle smerti (prodolzhenie tragedii)" ["Vladimir Mayakovsky: Life after Death (the Continuation of a Tragedy)"], Nash sovremennik 12 , 173-84. For an overview of the Perestroika and Post-Soviet reevaluation of Mayakovsky, see "MC," 266-307.
8. Menzel and Sundaram have begun to critically examine Mayakovsky's Soviet myth. After a thematic discussion of Mayakovsky's work, Menzel chronologically traces his reception in the Stalin period, focusing on four points of reception: 1935, 1940, 1945, and 1954. Sundaram traces Mayakovsky's "Soviet myth" from the 1920s to the post-Soviet reconsideration of Mayakovsky in the early 1990s. In part, both authors are responding to the notorious thesis by Boris Groys that posits an essential continuity between the Russian avant-garde and the later Stalinist culture of Socialist Realism. See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, trans. Charles Rougle, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), originally published as Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin: die Gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion, (München, 1988). Sundaram dissents from what she sees as Menzel's suggestion of a "contradictory but nevertheless essential continuity between aspects of the left avant-garde and Socialist Realism" that ultimately supports Groys' thesis ("MC," 5). She rightly argues that "reception" is not an appropriate concept for the state's control and promotion of the "Mayakovsky legend." Despite their differences, both authors trace Mayakovsky's Soviet image through the decades.
9. Katerina Clark has noted that during the Stalin period official directives did not simply oppose alternatives posited by intellectuals but usually endorsed one position in a currently raging debate. See Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 279. Menzel and Sundaram have discussed this debate in more detail; see MR, 130-3 and "MC," 124-31. Sundaram discusses Nikolai Bukharin's address about Mayakovsky as a balanced, admiring appraisal, and deems the Writer's Congress to be "the last genuine public debate about Mayakovsky in an official forum until the late 1980s" ("MC," 126).
10. Pervyi vsesoiznyi s'ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934. Stenograficheskii ochet (Moscow: Sovietskii Pisatel', 1990), 496. Though part of a speech praising Mayakovsky as a classic revolutionary poet, this phrase would come back to haunt Bukharin, as he and most former RAPP members (Leopold Averbakh, Aleksei Selivanovskii, and others) would be arrested as Trotskyites in 1936-38 (MR, 160).
11. For an example of these discussions of poetry, see Eugeniia Mustangova, "Sotsialisticheskii realizm i poeziia," in V sporakh o metode: sbornik statei o sotsialisticheskom realizme, ed. Nikolai Zhdanov, (Leningrad: Leningradskoe Oblastnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1934), 170-82. On continuing discussions about the "lagging behind of the lyric" at the 1937 Plenum conference, see MR, 140.
12. For a discussion of the vagueness that characterized the party's pronouncements on cultural policy and the difficulty of interpreting the correct line, see Shelia Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 26-7.
13. Quoted in Evgenii Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 132; hereafter abbreviated as MSR. The worker's remark was originally published in Pisatel' pered sudom rabochego chitatelia: Vechera rabochei kritiki. (Leningrad, 1928), 76.
14. On the optimism of writers in this period, which Stalin's remark helped to destroy, see Fleischman, Boris Pasternak, 188-9.
15. "Ot redaktsii" ["From the Editors"], Pravda, 5 December 1935, 4.
16. Many anticipated that official support for Mayakovsky would mean acceptance of the avant-garde. Paradoxically, however, Mayakovsky's canonization was accompanied by the suppression of his literary style (MR, 145-6).
17. Rachel Schmidt, Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the 18th Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999). Schmidt draws on John Guillory's studies of literary value and canon formation, which demonstrate how canonizing authorities try to naturalize the existence of a certain set of classics as well as promote a certain set of values. See John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
18. Referring to textual commentaries on "classic" texts, Iuri Streidter suggests that critical commentaries not only define the canonized text but necessarily react to previous commentaries. See Iuri Streidter, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, l989), 203-4. The idea of "commentary" that I put forth in this article includes not just criticism but events (exhibits, conferences, skits) and printed genres (criticism, biography, fiction, poetry) that perpetuate a view of the author as classic for a given audience. "Commentary" in this sense is broader then Striedter's usage, and applies not to a work, but to the author as a cultural re. It refers not simply to critical response, but to a defining set of texts, events, and practices that create and sustain value.
19. See Guillory, Cultural Capital, 18-22.
20. I do not mean to imply that the relations between party authorities, writers, and publishers were static. The degree and kind of party control over literary processes and res varied throughout the Soviet period. This topic deserves its own study.
21. Karen Petrone has made this point in reference to the 1937 Pushkin celebration; however, it must extend to other literary celebrations as well. Petrone has stated that the Pushkin Centennial of 1937 "stood at the crossroads of contradictory discourses of inclusion and exclusion, of celebration and terror." Karen Petrone, "Life has Become More Joyous, Comrades": Politics and Culture in Soviet Celebrations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 115; hereafter abbreviated as PC. On Stalin's appropriation of the term "intelligentsia" to mean political as well as cultural res, see Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 16. On the "unity of the party and the people" as the real basis for Socialist Realism, see MSR, 138-45.
22. See, for example, the numerous reports and testimonials about amateur Pushkin conferences related to the jubilee that were published in Soviet newspapers in 1936-37. These have been discussed in part by Petrone; see PC, 116-20. Newspapers from March and April 1940 repeatedly describe the joyous preparations of a variety of workers groups, schools, and citizens reading groups for the Mayakovsky celebration.
23. Streidter, Literary Structure, 204-6.
24. The distinction between classic authors and classic texts is often blurred or ignored in critical discussions of literary canons. This is particularly important in the Russian context, because the Russian language itself distinguishes between the classic text and the classic author. Unlike English, the Russian language has specific terms that distinguish between klassik (a classic author) and klassika (classic texts). These two separate concepts have a complex relationship; most, but not all klassika are written by a klassik. However, some are not: the Igor Tale, for instance. An author with a biography is not a required element of klassika. Moreover, not all texts written by a Russian klassik are necessarily considered klassika, such as Gogol's Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends, or Lermontov's pre-1837 poetry.
25. Quoted in V. V. Katanian, Lilia Brik, Vladimir Maiakovskii i drugie mushchiny [Lili Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Other Men] (Moscow: Zakharov, 1998), 104.
26. The directive has been published in VKI, 420-1. See also Larisa Alekseeva, "Desiat' Let Spustia (ob odnoi neotkryvshie vystavke V. Maiakovskogo)" ["Ten Years Later (about One Unopened Exhibition of V. Mayakovsky)"], Oktiabr 11 : 179, hereafter abbreviated as "DLS"; also see "MC," 158. Alekseeva notes that in 1938 all archives were placed under control of the secret police. She goes on to discuss the main jubilee exhibit, which was to be created for the Mayakovsky anniversary celebration, but which apparently was never put on.
27. "MC," 161. See the following articles advocating a new, improved Mayakovsky museum for the masses: L. Uspenskii, "Sozdat' muzei zhizni i tvorchestva Mayakovskogo" ["Create a Museum of the Life and Work of Mayakovsky"], Sovetskii muzei 7 : 29-32; V. Volina, "Sozdat' muzei, dostoinyi imeni luchshego poeta sovetskoi epokhi," ["Create a Museum, Worthy of the Name of the Best Poet of the Soviet Epoch"], Sovetskii Muzei 10 : 24-6. Several documents from 1938, preserved in the archives of the State Mayakovsky Museum, document the new institution's struggle to obtain from Lili Brik notebooks, manuscripts, and letters she considered personal and not subject to the government decree.
28. See "Uvekovecheniie pamiati V. V. Maiakovskogo" ["Immortalizing the Memory of V. V. Mayakovsky"], Literaturnaia Gazeta (10 January 1940): 1. This directive announces that the Soviet of People's Commissars has created a national "Mayakovsky" committee, including Nikolai Aseev, Vladimir Pertsov, Aleksander Fadeev, and others (but not the Briks). The report states that the committee was authorized "in a ten-day period [!] to create and introduce for approval a plan for popularizing and memorializing Mayakovsky and his work among all the Soviet peoples." On this directive also see "DLS," 177-9.
29. See Larisa Alekseeva, "Istochniki o zhizni i tvorchestve V. V. Maiakovskogo v sobranii gosudarstvennogo literaturnogo muzeia. Problemy analiza i interpretatsii" ["Original Sources on the Life and Work of V. Mayakovsky in the Collections of the State Literary Museum: Problems of Analysis and Interpretation"] (diss., Russkii Gosudarstvennyi Gumanisticheskii Universitet, 1996), 95. Petrone has also noted that the vast 1937 Pushkin celebration was organized in part to undermine alternate Pushkin celebrations at home and abroad and reinforce the Soviet regime's ownership of the cultural heritage. See PC, 114-5.
30. See Sergei Rumiantsev and Aleksei Shul'pin, Sud'ba sovetskogo prazdnika: samodeiatel'noe khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR. Ocherki istorii 1930-1950 gg (Moscow: Gos. Institut Iskusstva i Minesterstvo Kul'tury, 1995), 2:260-2. Major literary celebrations of this period include the seventy-fifth anniversary of Chekhov's birth , the one-hundredth anniversary of Pushkin's death , the 750th anniversary of the Georgian poet Rustaveli's "Vitiaz' v tigrovoi shkure" ["The Knight in the Tiger's Skin"] , the 150th anniversary of Byron's birth , the 750th anniversary of the Igor Tale , and the celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Mikhail Lermontov's death .
31. See, for example, the comments in S. N. Lunacharskaia, Iubilei A. S. Pushkina v shkole [The Pushkin Jubilee in the Schools] (Moscow: Uchpedgiz, 1936), 3. In this manual for organizing school events of the 1937 Pushkin celebration, Lunacharskaia contrasts the 1932 Soviet Goethe celebration with the one held in Germany: "Just as the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's death in Fascist Germany distorted the image of Germany's great poet and suppressed his true merits, the celebration of this holiday in the Soviet Union unfurled before the proletariat the great significance of Goethe's work for the culture of humanity" .
32. For a detailed discussion of the Pushkin days, see PC, 113-49.
33. Marcus Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of l880 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, l989), 165-6; hereafter abbreviated as RLP.
34. See RLP; Stephen Moeller-Sally has slightly modified this approach in his study of the Imperial Government's 1909 Gogol Days, using Jürgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere. See Stephen Moeller-Sally, "Gogol Redux: Inventing a Literary Classic in Late Imperial Russia" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, l992); hereafter abbreviated as "GR."
35. Marcus Levitt, "Pushkin in 1899," in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert Hughes, Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, l992), 159.
36. See RLP and "GR."
37. For examples of how "literary pages" were to be used in the jubilee, see N. Zamotin, "Literaturnye stranitsy o Pushkine v gazetakh" ["Literary Pages about Pushkin in the Newspapers"], Literaturnaia Ucheba 1 : 137-44 and "A. S. Pushkin 1837-1937: V pomoshch' gazete k pushkinskim dniam" ["A. S. Pushkin 1837-1937: For the Assistance of the Papers for the Pushkin Days"] (Sverdlovsk: Iz sverdlovskogo oblastnogo pushkinskogo komiteta, 1937).
38. See for example the large volume of portraits, illustrations, and photographs of Mayakovsky edited by N. Golubentsev for teachers' use in the classroom: N. Golubentsev, Vladimir Maiakovskii v portretakh i illustratsiiakh: posobie dlia uchitelei srednei shkoly [Vladimir Mayakovsky in Portraits and Illustrations: An Aid for School Teachers] (Moscow: Uchpedgiz, 1940). The author's introduction stresses that this is a commemorative volume like those issued for other Soviet classics, including Pushkin, Nikolai Nekrasov, and Jara Shevchenko.
39. Handleman defines public events as "phenomenally valid forms that mediate persons into collective abstractions by inducing action, knowledge and experience through these self same forms." See Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15; hereafter abbreviated as MM.
40. Several jubilee texts both represent and model transformation explicitly in portrayals of Mayakovsky's readings. In one jubilee poem depicting Mayakovsky's performance of his verse, for example, the crowd is initially presented as a hostile, inarticulate beast. Mayakovsky calms, transforms, and unifies the audience, giving the power of speech and understanding. The crowd leaves this performance discussing the poems amongst themselves. These poems suggest to readers that, like the revolution, Mayakovsky's readings both educated and humanized the public. It is implied that these jubilee poems about Mayakovsky can do the same for the reader in 1940. See Yaroslav Smeliakov, "Vladimir Maiakovskii," Znamia 4-5 : 121-2.
41. Handelman's typology does help to illustrate the differences between Soviet and pre-revolutionary celebrations, but it is only of limited usefulness in studying how Soviet celebrations worked. He explicitly states that his typology cannot help define the boundaries of a particular event, diachronic changes in an event over time, emotional effects of the event on participants, or relations between different types of events. See MM, 58. A wider notion of "commentary" allows us to consider aspects neglected by Handelman's scheme: relationships between themes, forms, and authors that were part of both published sources and jubilee events. Future study of the commentary on Mayakovsky will require including materials published during the anniversary year, alongside the events that made up the jubilee proper.
42. See "GR" and RLP.
43. On public celebrations in general as the source of a vision of Soviet cultural unity see PC, 1-20.
44. The concept of "culturedness" could thus incorporate cultural literacy into a new value system in a way that mitigated the impression that the literary classics were part of suspect bourgeois culture. On the shifting concept of this ideal, and how it could be a tool for both shaping behavior and leveling social classes, see Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov, "Directed Desires: Kul'turnost' and Consumption," in Constructing Russian Culture in an Age of Revolution 1881-1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (New York: Oxford University Press), 291-314. On "culturism" see Jeffery Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature 1861-1917, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 317-21. Also see Brooks's source for the term: Edwin Reischauer and John K. Fairbank's East Asia: The Great Tradition (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 293. The Imperial Government's official Pushkin celebration of 1899 can be seen as a similar, but much more limited attempt to realign this Russian culturism with official nationality. Soviet celebrations were much more comprehensive than Imperial Russian celebrations in making culturism support the official regime.
45. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 317.
46. Though it did not set up and support a Soviet literary canon until the 1930s, the government had long before moved to control the literary classics. The Council of People's Commissars decreed on 11 January 1918 that a list of Russian classics were to be published only by the state publishing agency. Publishing popular editions of the classics then received top priority. See Maurice Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets, (New York: Columbia University Press, l962), 10-4; hereafter abbreviated as RC.
47. Vladimir Papernyi, Kultura Dva [Culture Two], (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1996), 47-50.
48. Boris Gasparov, "The 'Golden Age' and its Role in the Cultural Mythology of Russian Modernism," in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert Hughes, and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, l992), 1-19.
49. I. Luppol, "Velichie poeta," Izvestiia (10 February 1937): 2. The two verse lines are from "Whether I Wander along Noisy Streets. . ." ("Brozhu li ia vdol' ulits shumnykh").
50. Petrone discusses first-hand accounts of participants in parades and ceremonies that describe how they were invigorated by Stalin's all-seeing gaze upon them; see PC, 26-7.
51. This can be seen in particular in the many articles on the theme "Mayakovsky and Pushkin" written in 1937 for the Pushkin celebration. Many of these explicitly portray the two poets as allegorical representations of the kinship between the "Golden Age" of Russian poetry and the Stalin era.
52. See Sergei Tregub, "Solntse sovetskoi poezii" ["The Sun of Soviet Poetry"], Smena 4 : 9-10. The title of Tregub's 1940 article references the lone death notice for Pushkin published in 1837 in the literary supplement to the journal Russkii Invalid, which had declared simply "the Sun of Russian poetry has set." The quotation highlights the inherent ambiguities in the state's promotion of the two poets. Many writers in the years immediately after Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930 had interpreted his death as a symbolic recurrence of Pushkin's death, an expression of the "poet's fate" in Russia. Roman Jakobson made this connection in the well-known article, "On a Generation that Squandered its Poets" ["O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov"] . Pasternak's poem "The Death of the Poet" also referenced the connection, its intertextual allusion to Lermontov's verse indicting society for Pushkin's 1837 death by dueling. In declaring Mayakovsky the "Sun of Soviet Poetry," Tregub (perhaps intentionally) raises the underlying issue of the poet's death in a time of autocracy, a subject with less than positive connotations for the Soviet government in the 1930s.
53. Between December 1935 and February 1937, at least ten articles were published in major newspapers and journals on the theme "Mayakovsky and Pushkin." No other writer's ties to Pushkin received anything close to this amount of attention in the same period.
54. See PC, 10-1. In fact, I would stress that literary celebrations were the main source of the new ideal of Soviet "high" culture as a unified tradition incorporating all the Soviet republics, but of course led by Russian literary tradition. See also Petrone's discussion of the 1937 Pushkin celebration's symbolic representation of the brother republics embracing Pushkin as part of their "native" tradition (PC, 129-31). National unity was also represented by the parallel events held for the literary res of other republics.
55. "Iubilei Lermontova," Literaturnaia Gazeta (5 October 1939): 1.
56. These themes are particularly evident in biographical writings and memoirs published for the celebration. The poet's sister, Liudmila Maiakovskaia, stressed Mayakovsky's love for Georgia and his mixed Cossak/Ukranian ancestry in "Na rodine Maiakovskogo" ["In Mayakovsky's Homeland"], 30 Dnei 3-4 : 20-3. On depictions of Mayakovsky's childhood in Georgia that connect the poet to Stalin, see MR, 171.
57. Alexander Fadeev, Maiakovskii. Doklad na torzhestvennom trauernom sobranii pravleniia soiuza sovetskikh pisatelei SSSR sovmestno s partiinymi, sovetskimi, i obshchetsvennymi organizatsiiami goroda Moskvy v Bol'shom teatre 14 aprelia 1940. [A Paper for the Solemn Funereal Gathering of the Directors of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR together with the Party, Soviet and Civic Organizations of the City of Moscow in the Bolshoi Theater on 10 April 1940] (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1940), 3.
58. See Menzel's overview of the Mayakovsky jubilee year output: "16 monographs, including four memoir volumes (Spasskii, Kassil', Shklovskii, and Kamenskii) four omnibus volumes, Radio performances, a documentary film written by O. Brik, an artistic film script (Aseev's "Sploshnaia Nevidal'"), a series of musical works, including one symphony, and more than 200 works published in newspapers and journals" (MR, 142).
59. Alekseeva discusses one jubilee exhibit that was never opened, despite extensive preparation. She attributes this to controversies among the organizing committee over the extent to which Mayakovsky's biography and work should be censored. She concludes that, in the context of the museum exhibit, the new Soviet myth imposed on Mayakovsky's image was ultimately impossible to reconcile with the documentary materials (photos, manuscripts, letters) that an exhibition required. See "DLS," 186.
60. See the description of this film published in "Vladimir Maiakovskii: Novyi dokumental'nyi fil'm," Sovietskii Kinoekran 7 : 10. The article informs the public of an artistic film about Mayakovsky to be finished by the end of the year. Apparently it was never finished; later discussions of Mayakovsky in film do not mention it, and no notice of its release appeared in major Soviet papers.
61. See for example Agniia Ezerskaia, "Maiakovskii v bibliotekakh" ["Mayakovsky in the Libraries"], Krasnyi bibliotekar' 2 : 3-16; see also the discussion of Mayakovsky in the kindergarten classroom: N. V. Oppengeim, "Maiakovskii v detskom sadu." ["Mayakovsky in Kindergarten"], Doshkol'noe vospitanie 6 : 44-5.
62. Of all Mayakovsky's former associates, Pasternak was the one most noticeably absent from jubilee events. In April 1940 he had just completed his translation of Hamlet, which was being reviewed just at the time of the Mayakovsky celebration.
63. On this theme in the Pushkin celebration see PC, 117-8.
64. Oleg Leonidov, "Zhivoi Maiakovskii (obzor gazet)" ["The Living Mayakovsky (A Survey of the Newspapers)"], Zvezda 7 : 188.
65. N. M. Zakovich, Sovetskaia obriadnost' i dukhovnaia kul'tura [Soviet Ceremonial Ritual and Spiritual Culture] (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1980), 214-5.
66. Alexander Zakharov, "Mass Celebrations in a Totalitarian System," in Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture, ed. and trans. Alla Efimova and Lev Manovich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 210-5. See also PC, 13-8.
67. A. S. Bubnov, "Pushkinskoe nasledstvo," Literaturnaia Gazeta (15 February 1937): 2.
68. The extent to which the public believed the rhetoric of the Mayakovsky celebration is unclear. The resolution of this question in regards to the massive cultural undertaking of jubilees must involve Slavoj Zizek's recent position that the "culture industry" of the type described by Adorno does not exist in totalitarian societies, whose regimes do not intend to cultivate actual belief in the ruling ideology. i ek suggests that totalitarian regimes operate on "cynical reason," which acknowledges and exists in the gap between the ideological mask of the regime and the reality. "Cynical reason," in Zizek's formulation, does not expect to create the illusion of truth; instead it uses "extra-ideological violence and the promise of gain" to secure its subject's obedience. Applying "cynical reason" to institutions like the Mayakovsky celebration might suggest that it was not meant to inculcate belief in the official Mayakovsky myth, but was merely a means to secure complicity in the system that allowed the state to dictate literary and cultural worth, production of texts, and literary value. Zizek's theory, however, does not account for the potential for variation, the possibility that the "industry" of the celebration was to present truth to some, and complicity to others. However, his theory does suggest the possibility that the "mass inculcation of Mayakovsky into the national consciousness" (as Alekseeva phrased it) was not necessarily the celebration organizers' main goal. This issue cannot be resolved here, but suggests the need for future study of the literary celebration. See Slavoj Zizek, "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?" in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek, (London: Verso, 1994), 212-3.
69. For these themes in general in literature from 1940, see MR, 165-8.
70. See Ezerskaia, "Maiakovskii v bibliotekakh," in Krasnyi Biblotekar' [Red Librarian] 2 : 3-16.
71. Mayakovsky jubilee pages were published in Stalinskaia Pravda,Pravda,Krasnoe Znamia,30 Dnei,Ogonek,Molodoi Kolkhoznik,Izvestiia,Krokodil,Krasnyi Bibliotekar',Industriia-Sotsialism and Obshchestvennitsa,Sovietskoe Studenchestvo, and many other Soviet periodicals. Thus army personnel, collective farm workers, students, women activists, and industrial workers, as well as readers of popular literary magazines, were exposed to jubilee publications.
72. Published memoirs and testimonials often describe a citizen overcoming a previous dislike or misunderstanding of the poet's work. The numerous amateur conferences no doubt were intended to support the idea of public reading as a way to "comprehend" Mayakovsky or to display one's own erudition. See the account of one technician, N. Progrov, published in a newspaper article:
I have read almost all of Mayakovsky's works. In the beginning, I understood them with difficulty, because I didn't know how to read. Then I began to practice reading aloud and gradually assimilated his style. I was convinced, that in each poem of Mayakovsky's, even a small one, there is a deep meaning. Now Mayakovsky is my very favorite poet. I have acquired a full collection of his works. I read through them over and over again.
See "Chitateli o Maiakovskom" ["Readers about Mayakovsky"], Krasnoe Znamia (14 April 1940): 3. See also the published comments of M. Rudnev, a lathe operator, published in a commemorative column titled "Why We Love Mayakovsky":
Not long ago I met a man who, having never read Mayakovsky's poetry, began to vehemently judge it "incomprehensible." Of course, this is nonsense. Mayakovsky is comprehensible to all who know how to read thoughtfully and not rush through the book at a gallop. I once read to my comrades, the workers of our factory, the poem about Ivan Kozyrev, about Nette, about the Soviet passport. They asked me to read more and more . . .
See M. Rudnev, "Blizkii Umnyi Drug" ["A Close, Wise Friend"], Smena 4 : 19.
73. On Mayakovsky as a heroic re see MR, 163-5.
74. A similar point is made by Menzel, who finds characteristics of the Socialist Realist hero in several of the biographical texts published in 1940 (see MR, 163-71). More specifically, I would argue that the jubilee texts and events not only assigned Socialist Realist character traits to Mayakovsky, but produced a biographical narrative that draws on the "master plot" of Socialist Realism that Katerina Clark outlined in her definitive study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); hereafter abbreviated as SN. This narrative of evolution from "spontaneity" to "consciousness" is the ultimate pattern to which Mayakovsky's biography is subjugated; the literary celebration's traditional focus on the author's biography cultivated this model most effectively. The jubilee created a heroic narrative for Mayakovsky as an evolution in revolutionary consciousness manifested in meetings with mentor res that always resulted in more profound, revolutionary creative activity. I have written about this in my dissertation: "Creating the First Classic Poet of Socialist Realism: Mayakovsky as a Subject of 'Celebration Culture' 1935-1940" (University of Chicago, 2002).
75. See SN, 48-50. Biographies published about Mayakovsky in 1940 include: Vladimir Pertsov, Nash sovremennik (o V. V. Maiakovskom) [Our Contemporary (about V. V. Mayakovsky)], (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1940); A. Bikhter, Vladimir Maiakovskii: zhizn' i tvorchestvo [Vladimir Mayakovsky: Life and Work], (Saransk: Mordgiz, 1940); and Lev' Kassil', Maiakovskii-sam. Ocherk zhizni i raboty poeta [Mayakovsky Himself. A Sketch of the Poet's Life and Work], (Moscow: Detizdat, 1940).
76. Mayakovsky did underground work for the communist party in Moscow as a juvenile in 1908-10 and was imprisoned twice. He abandoned party work before beginning his poetic career with the "Cubo-Futurist" group in 1912. He never belonged to the party as an adult. His early years of party work were, of course, emphasized in 1940 as the genesis of his supposed "evolution toward communism."
77. See Mayakovsky's suicide note, as reproduced in the newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda on 15 April 1930: "Comrade Government, my family is Lili Brik, my mother, my sisters, and Vera Vitoldovna Polonskaia. If you can arrange a bearable life for them—thank you."
78. On other jubilee texts about Gorky and Mayakovsky that portrayed a close relationship between the two, see MR, 169-70. Menzel does not see this relationship as part of the Socialist Realist novelization of Mayakovsky's biography, but as part of the larger project to link Mayakovsky to Soviet authorities such as Lenin, Stalin, and Gorky.
79. Maria Andreeva, "Iz vospominanii" ["From My Memories"], Pravda (13 April 1940): 4. These jubilee texts simplify a relationship not always so cordial. Lili Brik later suggested directly that Mayakovsky's relationship with Gorky was misrepresented in Soviet criticism (MR, 170). See also Katanian, Lilia Brik, 32-4; Katanian describes how Mayakovsky discovered that Gorky had spread unfounded rumors that Mayakovsky had given a young girl syphilis and then blackmailed her parents. This incident and Mayakovsky's subsequent falling-out with Gorky are never cited in jubilee articles. Viktor Shklovsky seems to be the only jubilee writer who mentioned this incident and its aftermath. See Viktor Shklovsky, O Maiakovskom [About Mayakovsky; published in English as Mayakovsky and his Circle, trans. Lily Feiler (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972)], (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1940), 117-8.
80. The distance between urban and rural Soviet life has been revealingly demonstrated by Veronica Gorres, Natalia Korenevskaia, and Thomas Lahusen, the editors of Intimacy and Terror. By juxtaposing quotations from the newspaper Izvestiia with diary entries written by a peasant collective farm worker, this volume effectively shows how the countryside operated with a different set of concerns, priorities, and timetables than city life. The Pushkin celebration that filled the pages of Izvestiia in 1937 leaves no trace in the farm worker's diary. See Intimacy and Terror, ed. Veronica Gorres, Natalia Korenevskaia, and Thomas Lahusen, trans. Carol Flath (New York: The New Press, 1995).
81. MR, 135. Chertok suggests that this article created a "new category of crime" ("novyi sostav prestupleniia"); he points out that Stalin directed his reply not to Brik herself, but to Ezhov, the head of the secret police, suggesting the potential punishment for this new "crime." See Simon Chertok, Posledniaia liubov Maiakovskogo [Mayakovsky's Last Love], (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ermitazh, 1983), 39. An article titled "Indifference" ("Bezrazlichie") published in 1937 makes the threat implied in the statement quite explicit:
There is no doubt that members of the Writer's Union Committee of the Byelorussian republic . . . remember well the words of comrade Stalin about Mayakovsky. They are well acquainted with not only the high evaluation which comrade Stalin gave Mayakovsky, but also the words stating that indifference to Mayakovsky's memory and his works is a crime. However, it is one thing to remember, and another to understand that they must make practical conclusions from these words . . .
See O. Del', "Bezrazlichie (ot nashego minskogo korrespondenta)," Literaturnaia Gazeta (10 April 1937): 1.
82. Quoted in Katanian, Lilia Brik, 103. Katanian quotes Roy Medvedev's memoirs published in the journal Kontinent. Sundaram quotes this same passage, noting that many of the Briks' enemies attributed their survival of the purges to their close relationships with the secret police. See "MC," 160-1. It seems equally likely that their arrest might have tainted the reputation of the State Poet.
83. Menzel's survey of work about Mayakovsky after 1935 shows the number of texts published by his former colleagues, thus indicating that the state approval of Mayakovsky's work suggested (or compelled) relatively safe avenues of literary activity.
84. Beside Shklovsky's O Maiakovskom, see Vasilii Kamensky's memoir, Zhizn' s Maiakovskim [Life with Mayakovsky], (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1940).
85. See Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 16, 79-83.
86. On these and other texts as different from the standard jubilee treatments, see MR, 164-6.
87. See Irina Mess-Beir, Mandelstam i Stalinskaia epokha: ezopovskii iazyk v poezii Mandelstama 30-x godov [Mandelstam and the Stalin Epoch: Aesopian Language in Mandelstam's Poetry of the 1930s](Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1997), 6.
88. Petrone notes that a film of Pushkin's "A Journey to Arzrum" was released in 1937 and surely suggested Aesopian meanings to its audience, with its themes of a persecuted poet longing to leave the country (PC, 182).
89. Rita Rait, "V uzhe klassicheskom Pushkin" ["In an Already Classical Pushkin"], Literaturnyi Sovremennik 4 : 113. The phrase "as is well known" (kak izvestno) is also perhaps significant here, as it was a familiar phrase of Stalin's, generally used to introduce statements of doctrine, policy, or ideology that were not "well known" at all.
90. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope (New York: Athenaeum, 1970), 120-1.
91. Several articles by Yakhontov were published in 1936-40 about this show. Yakhontov was a famous actor and theater director, and a popular performer of Mayakovsky's verse through the 1930s; he is listed on several programs for Mayakovsky jubilee events.
92. Menzel notes that Akhmatova published this poem after years of being unable to publish work; see MR, 150. However, Akhmatova had published scholarship for the Pushkin celebration in 1937; in 1940 she published this poem in Maiakovskomu [To Mayakovsky], as well as a volume of her own poetry, Iz shesti knig [From Six Books]. The door to publication may have been opened for Akhmatova before the celebration. It is clear, however, that this poem enabled her first public performance for years, suggesting that the jubilee allowed Akhmatova to reconnect with an audience.
93. The term "poet-function" is adapted from Michel Foucault's well-known concept of "author-function." See Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124-7. For another use of this concept to explore the development of a Russian classic, see "GR," 167-9.
94. See SN and Hans Günther, "Zhiznennye fazy sotsrealisticheskogo kanona"["Life Phases of the Socialist Realist Canon"], in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), 281-9. Günther suggests that there are two types of canons: one of texts (examples) and one "regularizing canon" in which the norms for text production are defined. Though acknowledging the primary role of institutions in the canonization process, Günther does not consider the role of literary and cultural institutions, or the individual writer. Both Clark and Günther's theoretical discussions of Socialist Realism pointedly omit poetry.