Hi Sean - I actually don't think there's an escape from that dilemma,
unless you decide not to put out any work anywhere at all. Which is of
course an option, but also maybe an act of total defeat. I don't know.
I certainly don't have any answers.

I wasn't referring to The Bath House or The Bedbug, but to his circus
play Moscow in Flames (which opened a week after his death) which was
written to celebrate the anniversary of the 1905 (?) uprising. He
wrote those plays all along, and they were unreservedly propaganda
(doesn't mean, btw, that they're not interesting), just as his posters
were.

Stalin became General Secretary in 1922 and - if I'm remembering
rightly, which I might not be - took over the leadership around 1928.
VM died in 1930, and Stalin w as certainly in power then. Stalin's
declaration on VM came after a personal appeal to Stalin from VM's
ex-lover Lili Brik in which she asks for his help in preserving
Mayakovsky's legacy. It wasn't just thugs who were critical of VM
(though it was mainly the bureaucrats he hated) - I've been reading
Serge's essays, in which he takes Mayakovsky sternly to task for his
individualism and use of Christian motifs, basically for not being
destructive *enough*, and they're very interesting because Serge is no
idiot. Those are early essays - mid 1920s or so. Serge is fascinating
because he loathed what happened with the counter-revolution - his
last book - which is an astounding masterpiece of a novel - is a total
take down of the Stalinist state that still refuses to abjure the
ideals of the revolution, even though by the time he died in Mexico in
1948 it was all basically over.

I think in the west we tend to underestimate the general belief in the
revolutionary state, because the narrative we get is mainly from
dissidents. No, none of it is simple.

Yes, I'll be writing a libretto on this for the superlatively
bourgeois artform the opera later this year, and hoping that it won't
be an artcrime. I'll certainly be doing my best, and I've got the
composer to do it. Just at the reading phase. What are you doing?

xA

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Sean Bonney <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>



-- 
Editor, Masthead:  http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com