Hi Alison // its very complicated in Mayakovsky's case, but the history of
the revolution is pretty complicated itself. I don't think those last plays
could really be called propaganda plays, tho. The Bathhouse and The Bedbug
were both brilliant satires on what the Russian state was becoming, and he
got in a lot of trouble for it. And sadly, most of the overtly propagandist
things he wrote didn't go down very well with anybody.
Didn't he kill himself before Stalin took power? Not quite sure, but I think
he did. And most of his problems came from rival art gangs - proletkult
hacks who didn't like all the avant things he was publishing in the LEF
magazines etc. Of course, its impossible to say how he'd have dealt with
Stalin's posthumous approval, but since he'd been fairly outspokenly
critical of the government since the introduction of the New Economic Policy
in 1923 or whatever it was, I'd hope that he wouldn't have been too pleased.
I often wonder why he didn't make any reference to Krondstadt, or Trotsky's
massacre of the Maknovists, but then he probably didn't know too much about
it (like, it probably wasn't all over the front pages of Pravda). But I
think he still believed in the revolution up to his death because it was
still - just about - possible to believe in it. But with Stalin, any
relation to what communism is supposed to be was dead, completely wiped out.
So Stalin's praise is a pretty vile example of recuperation.
I think its true that everything does get it in the end, tho its not
necessarily a brutal use of a piece of work for ends entirely other to what
its author intended. The Surrealists are simply neutralised in the English
speaking world, aren't they - all that pesky Marxism and Anarchism just gets
left out of the picture.
Seem to remember you mentioning a while back you were doing some work on
Mayakovsky. That right? Hows it going? I'm doing some stuff on him myself,
as it goes.
Sean x
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