Even though they attacked the “obsolete” symbolists, the Russian avant-gardists retained a mystical belief in the lofty mission of the theater. Their theater fixation was all-encompassing, as it was for the symbolists. Following the symbolists, the futurists were turning daily life into theater. The symbolists “theatricized” their relations with one another. The futurists brought this “home” theater into the streets. Malevich strolled down the streets with a large wooden spoon in his lapel. Mayakovsky showed off in a shirt of bright yellow, which had been designated the official color of futurism. The futurists painted their faces, drawing flowers on their cheeks and gilding their noses. They also earned pretty good money from shocking, theatricized debates, which attracted large, curious audiences.
Zheverzheyev organized one such debate in November 1912 at the Troitsky Theater of Miniatures, which he had founded and financed. This was one of the first theaters of its kind in Petersburg. Avant-garde art, rejected by established institutions, had access to the public on the stage of the Troitsky Theater (and similar small stages) and in the semiprivate cabarets like The Stray Dog. The manager of the Troitsky Theater was Alexander Fokine, the choreographer’s brother, a colorful figure and former race car champion. An unknown but promising young poet and artist was recommended to Zheverzheyev as someone who could deliver a lecture on the latest in Russian poetry. He was brought to Zheverzheyev, the arts patron liked him, and thus the debut of nineteen-year-old Mayakovsky in Petersburg took place under the aegis of the Union of Youth.
Tall and handsome, Mayakovsky shocked the audience with a statement made in his velvety voice that “the word requires spermatization,” and that in painting, as in other arts and literature, one needs to be a “shoemaker.” As Mayakovsky’s friend, the futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh, who liked to wear a couch pillow tied around his neck with a string, explained, “so that it writes tight and reads tight, more uncomfortable than greased boots or a truck in the living room.”45
And in the summer of 1913 in that “tight,” rough language Mayakovsky wrote a tragedy that he intended to call either
That wording was particularly appropriate because the poet was in fact the main character of his play. A young Boris Pasternak was stunned when Mayakovsky read it to him:
I listened, forgetting about myself, with my whole entranced heart, with bated breath. I had never heard anything like it in my life. The title concealed a brilliantly simple revelation, that the poet is not the author but the object of lyric poetry, addressing the world in the first person. The title was not the name of the writer, but the name of the contents.46
Mayakovsky’s tragedy was written under the obvious influence of the then-popular ideas on monodrama of the playwright and director Nikolai Evreinov, who was once sarcastically depicted thus by Viktor Shklovsky, an ally of the futurists:
Hair combed back, trimmed, very handsome, an official sadist, who published
When you come to his house, he claps his hands, and the fat young maid comes in. Evreinov says, “Bring some pheasants.”
“The pheasants are all eaten,” the maid replies.
“Then bring tea.”
This is called Theater for Oneself.47
Shklovsky, of course, was caricaturing the post-symbolist theater innovations of that great paradoxicalist, the “Russian Oscar Wilde,” Evreinov. He maintained that life was a constant “theater for oneself,” through which the personality defends itself from the chaos of the unknown world. He considered executions and torture as theater, too. Evreinov explained his concept of monodrama this way: “A dramatic performance, which, while trying to relate to the viewer the protagonist’s spiritual state as completely as possible, presents on stage the world around him as it is perceived by the protagonist at a given moment of his stage life.”48
Besides the Poet, the characters in the tragedy
