In November 1913 posters were pasted all over Petersburg announcing that the Luna-Park Theater in early December would present “the world’s first four productions by Futurists of the theater”:
The “Futurist Festival” opened with Mayakovsky’s play. Meyerhold and Blok were present. The brazen spectacle was undoubtedly connected to their theatrical ideas—the dreams of the symbolists for a ritual theater in which poet, actors, and viewers blended into one.
The tragedy took place against backdrops by Pavel Filonov and Ilya Shkolnik, depicting the city. (The sets were lost in 1924 during major flooding in Leningrad.) One of the backdrops was particularly memorable: “an agitated, colorful city port with numerous, thoroughly painted boats on the shores and beyond them, hundreds of city buildings, each of which was detailed down to the very last window.”50 At least one viewer was stunned by the scenery: “Perhaps what I saw then on that cardboard was the truest depiction of a city that I had ever seen…. I felt a movement inside myself, I felt the movement of the city in eternity, its horror as part of chaos.”51
Mayakovsky came out on the stage in his famous yellow shirt, supposedly playing himself. He was a marvelous actor, and many people in the audience were deeply moved when he melodramatically compared himself to an unneeded tear rolling down “the unshaven cheek of the squares.”
That cry of desperation by the young poet against the background of Filonov’s urban painting summed up the romantic and symbolist tradition of alienation in Petersburg. Pasternak, the Muscovite, recalling Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Andrei Bely’s magnum opus, emphasized Mayakovsky’s traditionality vis-à-vis Petersburg: “He saw beneath him the city that gradually rose up to him from the bottom of
All the performances were done under the aegis of the Union of Youth and paid for by Zheverzheyev. It was his finest hour. He recalled that the dress rehearsal of Mayakovsky’s play was attended by
the police chief himself (there were only four in the entire city) as well as the censor and the local policeman. In the breaks between acts and at the end of the rehearsal, the police chief pestered me with questions: “For God’s sake, tell me honestly, is this truly only futurist showing-off and nonsense? To tell the truth, I don’t understand a thing. There isn’t anything in it that’s … you know? … no? well, … seditious? There’s nothing I can put my finger on, I admit … I admit … but I feel that something’s wrong.53
That episode amply demonstrates the paradox and uniqueness of Zheverzheyev’s position in Petersburg. For the authorities he was a wealthy and respected businessman, the owner of a famous store for church supplies; thus he was connected to the most traditional and stable institution in tsarist Russia. But Zheverzheyev gave all his sympathies to a small group of enthusiasts of a shocking new art. He was not pretending or being a hypocrite but lived naturally in two worlds that were far apart from each other. His quiet confidence helped him to persuade the police authorities of the “innocence” of Mayakovsky’s play, which is now widely acknowledged as a pinnacle of the young futurist’s early work.
Mayakovsky’s avant-garde comrades complained that his tragedy was too accessible: “it never tears the word away from its meaning; it does not use the sound of the pure word as such.”54 This was the reaction of Mayakovsky’s friend Mikhail Matiushin—violinist, composer, painter, and one of the founders with Zheverzheyev of the Union of Youth. Matiushin, who was over fifty, was the oldest of the futurists; Blok noted sarcastically in his diary that he was “futuristically trying to look young.”
In the summer of 1913, Matiushin, Malevich, and Kruchenykh, meeting outside Petersburg, decided to write an opera. They proclaimed themselves the “First All-Russian Congress of Futurists” and issued a manifesto of their goal: “To swoop down on the bastion of artistic sickliness—the Russian theater—and to transform it decisively.” Interestingly, this manifesto was immediately published by many Petersburg newspapers; the public curiosity in their domestic futurists was quite high.
