Natasha's Dance полностью

cates his own crisis of identity, because in his imagination she is tied to the 'petty-bourgeois' byt of Russia in the NEP, which has diverted him from the ascetic path of the true revolutionary. This betrayal leads to a dramatic staging of the narrator's crucifixion, which then gives way to the redemptive vision of a future communist Utopia, where love is no longer personal or bodily in form but a higher form of brotherhood. At the climax of the poem the narrator catapults himself a thousand years into the future, to a world of communal love, where he pleads with a chemist to bring him back to life:

Resurrect me -

I want to live my share! Where love will not be - a servant of marriages,

lust,

money. Damning the bed,

arising from the couch, love will stride through the universe.⁸³

In 1930, at the age of thirty-seven, Mayakovsky shot himself in the communal flat in which he had lived, near the Lubianka building in Moscow, when the Briks would not have him. Suicide was a constant theme in Mayakovsky's poetry. The poem he wrote for his suicide note quotes (with minor alterations) from an untitled and unfinished poem written probably in the summer of 1929:

As they say,

a bungled story. Love's boat

smashed

against existence. And we are quits with life.

So why should we idly reproach each other

with pain and insults? To those who remain - I wish happiness.⁸⁴

The Briks explained his suicide as the 'unavoidable outcome of Mayakovsky's hyperbolic attitude to life'.⁸⁵ His transcendental hopes and expectations had crashed against the realities of life. Recent evidence has led to claims that Mayakovsky did not kill himself. Lily Brik, it has been revealed, was an agent of the NKVD, Stalin's political police, and informed it of the poet's private views. In his communal flat there was a concealed entrance through which someone could have entered Mayakovsky's room, shot the poet and escaped unnoticed by neighbours. Notes discovered in the archives of his close friend Eisenstein reveal that Mayakovsky lived in fear of arrest. 'He had to be removed - so they got rid of him,' concluded Eisenstein.⁸⁶

Suicide or murder, the significance of the poet's death was clear: there was no longer room in Soviet literature for the individualist. Mayakovsky was too rooted in the pre-revolutionary age, and his tragedy was shared by all the avant-garde who, like him, threw in their lot with the new society. The last works of Mayakovsky had been viciously attacked by the Soviet authorities. The press condemned The Bedbug (1929), a dazzling satire on Soviet manners and the new bureaucracy, with a sparkling score by Shostakovich which added to the montage by having several bands play different types of music (from classical to foxtrot) on and off the stage.⁸⁷ They said the play had failed to portray the Soviet future in heroic terms. 'We are brought to the conclusion', complained one reviewer, 'that life under socialism will be very dull in 1979' (it was, it turned out, an accurate portrayal of the Brezhnev years).⁸⁸ His next play, The Bath House, which opened in Meyerhold's theatre in Moscow just one month before the poet's death, was an awful flop, and its hilarious critique of Soviet bureaucrats again roundly condemned in the press. But the final straw was Mayakovsky's retrospective exhibition of his artwork, which he put on in Moscow in March 1930. The exhibition was consciously avoided by the artistic intelligentsia; the poet Olga Berggolts, who went to visit Mayakovsky there, recalls the sight of the 'tall man with a sad and

austere face, his arms folded behind him, as he paced the empty rooms'.⁸⁹ At an evening devoted to the exhibition, Mayakovsky said that he could no longer achieve what he had set out do - 'to laugh at things I consider wrong… and to bring the workers to great poetry, without hack writing or a deliberate lowering of standards'.⁹⁰