extraordinary looks) starred in several films as well. Meyerhold and Mayakovsky had been close friends since before the war. They shared the same far-left outlook on politics and theatre which found expression in their partnership on Mystery Bouffe. Mayakovsky played the part of the 'Person of the Future' - a proletarian deus ex machina who appeared on stage hanging from the ceiling - in the first (1918) production of his play. It was, he said, referring to himself and Meyerhold, 'our revolution in poetry and theatre. The mystery is the greatness of the action - the bouffe the laughter in it.'78 Mayakovsky spread his talents wide: to his poetry and his work in theatre and the cinema, he added journalism, writing radio songs and satires, drawing cartoons with brief captions for the lubok-like propaganda posters of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and creating advertising jingles for state stores and slogans for the banners which appeared on every street. His poetry was immersed in politics, even his intimate love lyrics to his mistress Lily Brik, and a good deal of his best-known verse, like the allegory 150,000,000 (1921), a Soviet parody of the bylina, which tells the story of the battle between Ivan, the leader of the 150 million Russian workers, and the Western capitalist villain Woodrow Wilson, was agitational. Mayakovsky's terse, iconoclastic style was tailor-made for political effect in a country such as Russia where the lubok and chastushka (a simple, often bawdy, rhyming song) had real roots in the mass consciousness, and he imitated both these literary forms.
Forward, my country,
move on faster! Get on with it,
sweep away the antiquated junk! Stronger, my commune,
strike at the enemy, Make it die out,
that monster, the old way of life.79
Mayakovsky embraced revolution as a quickening of time. He longed to sweep away the clutter of the past, the 'petty-bourgeois' domesticity of the 'old way of life' (byt), and to replace it with a higher
and more spiritual existence (bytie).* The battle against byt was at the heart of the Russian revolutionary urge to establish a more communistic way of life.80 Mayakovsky hated byt. He hated all routine. He hated all the banal objects in the 'cosy home': the samovar, the rubber plant, the portrait of Marx in its little frame, the cat lying on old copies of Izvestiia, the ornamental china on the mantelpiece, the singing canaries.
From the wall Marx watches and watches
And suddenly
Opening his mouth wide,
He starts howling:
The Revolution is tangled up in philistine threads
More terrible than Wrangelf is philistine byt
Better
To tear off the canaries' heads -
So communism
Won't be struck down by canaries.81
In much of his writing Mayakovsky talked of his desire to escape this humdrum world of material things ('it will turn us all into philis-tines') and to fly away, like a figure from Chagall, to a higher spiritual realm. This is the theme of his long poem Pro eto (About This) (1923), written in the form of a love song to Lily Brik, with whom he was living, on and off, in Petersburg and Moscow in a menage a trois with her husband, the left-wing poet and critic Osip Brik. In his autobiography Mayakovsky records that he wrote the poem 'about our way of life in general but based on personal material'. He said it was a poem 'about byt, and by this I mean a way of life which has not changed at all and which is our greatest enemy'.82Pro eto chronicles Mayakovsky's response to a two-month separation imposed by Lily Brik in December 1922. In it, the hero, a poet living all alone in his
* The word byt ('way of life') derived from the verb byvat', meaning to happen or take plat e. But from the nineteenth century, bytie took on the positive idea of 'meaningful existence' which became central to the Russian intellectual tradition, while byt became increasingly associated with the negative aspects of the 'old' way of life. + Leader of the White armies in southern Russia during the civil war.
29. Alexander Rodchenko: illustration from Mayakovsky's Pro eto (1923)
tiny room while his lover Lily carries on with her busy social and domestic life, dreams about a poem he wrote before 1917 in which a Christ-like figure, a purer version of his later self, prepares for the coming revolution. The despairing hero threatens to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Neva river: his love for Lily compli-
