XVII Literary Interest
The Congress ended and with a happy relief I turned from political meetings to social and literary affairs. The majority of the delegates had left, but I remained in Moscow writing. I was magnificently paid for poems and articles and became a front-page feature. Sometimes what I received in rubles for an article amounted when I figured it out to fifty American dollars. I had plenty of money to spend for food and cigarettes and even to frequent the cabarets. And besides, I was saving my fare to return to America.
I had no idea that I was being paid as a literary celebrity until one afternoon when I went to a newspaper office to receive my check. There I met an interesting Russian journalist. He was a titled person, a Count Something. After the revolution he had discarded his title, but since the Nep he had resumed it and signed himself Count. He remarked to me facetiously that perhaps his title of the old economic policy might help him to a better place under the New Economic Policy.
When I drew my check he looked at it and said: “Why, if they paid me one-tenth of what they pay you I would be rich. I could go to the casino and gamble and the cabarets to dance and wine.”
“Why,” I said, “I thought you got as much as I got.”
“No,” he said, “I couldn’t, for you are a guest writer, a big writer—bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi!” The interpreter who accompanied me was annoyed and he said something to the Count, who immediately clamped up. That, bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi! (big! big! big!) was sweet music in my ears and an inspiration. But it also stirred up a hell of discontent within me. Why should I be “big” translated into Russian? It was because I was a special guest of the Soviets, a good subject for propaganda effect, but inflated beyond my actual literary achievement. That was not enough for me. I felt that if I were to be bolshoi as a literary artist in a foreign language, I should first make a signal achievement in my native adopted language, English.
I met some of the notable Russian writers: Chukovsky, Boris Pilnyak, Eugene Zamiatin, Mayakovsky. I was invited to read at literary gatherings. My audiences were always enthusiastic and applauding, and also sometimes critical. “Tovarish,” I was often told, “your poems are not proletarian.” I replied, “My poetry expresses my feelings.” I shocked the pure proletarian intellectuals and I was proud that I was a privileged person in Russia, and in a position to shock them. One night I was invited to the Arbat to hear the proletarian poets read and discuss their compositions. Without understanding the language I was able to appreciate certain poems from their swing and movement and the voice of the reciter. And I had a good interpreter who rendered some into English for me. After each poem was delivered there was a general discussion of it. I was particularly pleased with the poem of a slim young man in a coarse peasant smock buttoned up to his chin, and with a worried, unhappy expression in his sensitive features. I knew at once that he was a peasant become proletarian like myself. He gave a charming poem. Even before translation I knew from its communicative color tone and the soft threne running through it like a silver chord that it expressed an individual longing for the life of the country, perhaps the ways that nevermore would be.
As soon as the poet had done I clapped my hands heartily. His poem and personality had unusually excited me, because I rarely applaud. I liked that poet with the intellectual anxiety of his face showing clearly that he was a little bewildered by that world-moving social shake-up. That expression was real, more real to me than the automatic enthusiasm of his fellow poets which seemed to me less sincere. They all jumped on him. “Alexis, you are not a proletarian poet!” And they criticized his subject matter. So I asked my interpreter to let me say a word. I said I thought it was natural for a man who had lived in the country to express his longing for it, whether he was a bourgeois or a proletarian.
Mayakovsky was then the premier proletarian poet. Chukovsky, the popular author of Crocodile and other children’s books, did not have the highest opinion of Mayakovsky. He told me that before the revolution Mayakovsky had been a futurist and that he used to wear fantastic clothes and had proclaimed his poems at the court of the Czar. Now Mayakovsky was a thundering proletarian poet. He recited one of his poems for me. It sounded like the prolonged bellow of a bull. He very kindly presented me with a signed copy of his latest book. Also he presented me to his wife, and said that she desired to dance a jazz with me. She was a handsome woman of an Arctic whiteness and appeared as if she had just stepped proudly out of a Dostoyevsky novel. We went to a gypsy cabaret and danced a little, but I am afraid that I did not measure up to the standard of Aframerican choreography. Mayakovsky told me that his great ambition was to visit America. I said I thought he would be a big success there in Russian costume, declaiming his poems in his trumpet voice.
The contemporary Russian poetry of the period which I liked best was that of the peasant poet Yessenin. His intimate friend, Zonov, translated some of his poems, and I was enchanted by their lyric simplicity and profundity. Zonov was always hoping that Yessenin and I would meet, but we never did. Just about the time when I disembarked at Petrograd, Yessenin and Isadora Duncan were landing in New York. And Yessenin did not return to Russia until after I had left in June of 1923.
Zonov held a place either executive or artistic at the Meyerhold Theater, which I visited frequently, for there was a congenial gang there. He often invited me to a private little feast in his den, where he served sweet Caucasian wine and caviar and sometimes champagne. Always with him was a little actress whom he fancied, but who did not seem to love him too much. Zonov looked like a tired professor, and he was always bewailing the absence of Yessenin. He exhibited a snapshot of Yessenin that he carried in his pocket book, and I was startled by its resemblance to the strange dancer I had known in New York. Zonov said unlovely things of Isadora Duncan, because she had married Yessenin and taken him from his friends. He said that Yessenin had proclaimed to them all that he did not love Isadora. But he had married her to get out of Russia, to see Europe and America. I said I did not consider love as always necessary, and that sometimes it might be expedient for a woman to save a man from his male friends. Zonov translated what I said to the actress and she screamed with laughter.
Meyerhold’s was the revolutionary constructivist theater, which did the most daring things in dramatic production. There were no curtains. The audience saw clear through to backstage and watched the actors waiting to take their parts and come up to and retire from the front of the stage. The plan was novel. Meyerhold himself was a fanatic crusader in his ardor to make a great revolutionary theater express the revolutionary social system. All the symbols of the machine system were assembled on the stage: dynamos, cranes, scaffolding and turbines, until it resembled a regular workshop. Meyerhold said to me: “We need now great revolutionary plays and playwrights to make my theater the unique dramatic expression of the revolution.” I had to talk to Meyerhold through an interpreter, but he impressed me as being more romantic than practical with his idea of making the stage the unique expression of the factory. I felt that after all the worker’s life is not limited to the factory and should never be.
I was interested in the Moscow workers’ attitude to the Meyerhold Theater. Whole blocks of seats were given to the factories and the barracks, but the theater, which was not very large, was never full. Yet the plays which Meyerhold put on were technically highly interesting. Vastly exciting to me was the presentation of The Inspector General, by Gogol. And unforgettable was one realistic scene of another play, in which the Czar was sitting on his chamber pot, with the imperial crown painted big upon it. But the workers and soldiers really preferred the ballet of the Bolshoi theater, the Moscow art theaters, the expressionist theater and the ordinary vulgar theaters. Whenever the workers received free tickets for the above-named theaters they never missed; workers and soldiers always filled them. But the audience of the Meyerhold Theater was of the intelligentsia—students and professional people. While the workers and soldiers showed a distinct preference for the straight familiar entertainment, it was the intelligentsia that was avid of revolutionary drama. The situation made me think of a Frenchman’s saying that most of the work of the experimental artists was not intended to enlighten the working class, but to “épater la bourgeoisie.”
I was invited to dinner by Lunarcharsky, the Commissar of Education and of Arts. He was one of the most flamboyant orators of the Soviet Union and also a talented playwright. I told him a little of the little I knew about education in general in America and Negro education in particular, and I seized the opportunity to mention the Russian theater and the theater of Meyerhold. I remarked that it was interesting that the workers and soldiers seemed to prefer the old ballet to the new experimental theater. Lunarcharsky said that in the early days of the revolution some had desired to suppress the ballet, but he had held out against it. He considered the ballet a great form of art and what he did was to give the workers and peasants and soldiers the chance to enjoy it, which they hadn’t had under the old régime. He had conserved and subsidized the best of the classical theaters for the entertainment of the people. But also he had granted subsidies to the experimental theaters to give them their chance to experiment in creating their best. Lunarcharsky was a wise mediator. It is related that when the Moscow masses, excited to high resentment against the Russian Orthodox Church, attempted to destroy the wonderful Cathedral of Vasilly Blazhenny, they were stopped by the intervention of Lunarcharsky. There was not a day of my stay in Moscow that my eyes failed to be glad in contemplation of Ivan the Terrible’s super-byzantine burnt offering to humanity. And Lunarcharsky in Moscow appeared like a guardian angel to me because he had made it possible for my eyes to see that glory.