How Lenin “arranged” Mayakovsky in Izvestia

On March 5, 1922, in Izvestia, in the absence of the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, in the heading “Our Life”, Mayakovsky’s poem “The Sitting Ones” was first published. There could have been a scandal, but everything turned out exactly the opposite. Thanks to Lenin.

With this poem, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s collaboration with Izvestia began, which lasted until 1927. Before that, he could not break into the newspaper.

I love Kuznetsky
(forgive the sinner!),
then Petrovka,
then Stoleshnikov;
on them
per year
a hundred or two hundred times
I go from Izvestia
and in Izvestia.

At first, the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, Yuri Steklov, resolutely did not like Mayakovsky’s poems. By the way, Vladimir Lenin did not particularly like the proletarian poet either. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, in her memoirs, writes about Ilyich’s visit on February 25, 1921 to the commune of students of the Higher Art and Technical Workshops:

“… Ilyich looked at the youth, at the shining faces of the young artists and artists who surrounded him, and their joy was reflected on his face. They showed him their naive drawings, explained their meaning, bombarded him with questions. And he laughed, evaded answers, answered questions with questions: “What do you read? Do you read Pushkin? – “Oh no! – someone blurted out, – he was, after all, a bourgeois. We are Mayakovsky! Ilyich smiled: “In my opinion, Pushkin is better.” After that, Ilyich became a little kinder to Mayakovsky. With this name, he remembered the Vkhutemas youth, full of life and joy, ready to die for Soviet power, unable to find words in modern language to express themselves, and looking for this expression in Mayakovsky’s obscure poems. (quoted from the book by N. K. Krupskaya “On Lenin. Collection of articles and speeches.” Moscow. Politizdat. 1965).

According to the memoirs of one of the students of Vkhutemas S. Senkin, V. I. Lenin promised the youth to read Mayakovsky:

“We get the first number of wall gas. Vladimir Ilyich deliberately read Mayakovsky’s slogan for a long time: “We are the pedlars of a new faith that sets an iron tone for beauty. So that the frail natures do not defile the squares, we shy reinforced concrete into the sky.

– We shy away, but this, perhaps, is not in Russian, is it?

At first we were somehow confused and didn’t answer anything, but a Vkhutemasov’s worker from the workers’ faculty helped us out, who said very loudly with a fuse:

“Why, Vladimir Ilyich, it’s like a worker. All workers say so.

Vladimir Ilyich was pleased with the answer, although he re-read the slogan once more, as if not completely agreeing with it. Obviously, our sympathies for Mayakovsky did not hide from him, and we did not even think to hide them. He asked how we like Mayakovsky. Of course, we all were a mountain for him, and, in turn, asked Vladimir Ilyich if he had read Mayakovsky’s poems. Vladimir Ilyich joked that he would choose the time – he would read it.

Nadezhda Konstantinovna, who was sitting next to him, remarked to him:

– Well, Volodya, you promise everything. After all, I offered you, and you put everything off.

Vladimir Ilyich began to laugh it off that he would still choose the time and read it. (published in The Young Guard, No. 2-3, 1924).

Lenin had a chance to “read” and evaluate Vladimir Mayakovsky in the early spring of 1922.

Once, when the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, Yuri Steklov, went on another business trip, the executive secretary of the editorial office, Osaf Litovsky, took advantage of his absence and went for broke: he published Mayakovsky’s poem “The Sitting Ones”.

A little night will turn into dawn,
I see every day
who’s in charge
who’s in whom
who is in politics
who is in the light
the people disperse into institutions.
Rain on paper things
as soon as you enter the building:
having selected from fifty –
The most important! —
employees go to meetings.

Returning, Steklov gave a dressing down, but then it turned out that Lenin really liked the poem. On March 6, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, speaking at the communist faction of the All-Russian Congress of Metalworkers, praised the “Protsessed”:

“Yesterday I accidentally read in Izvestia a poem by Mayakovsky on a political theme. I do not belong to the admirers of his poetic talent, although I fully admit my incompetence in this area. But for a long time I have not experienced such pleasure in terms of political and administrative. In his poem, he makes fun of the meetings and mocks the communists that they all sit and re-sess. I don’t know about poetry, but about politics I can guarantee that this is absolutely correct. We really are in the position of people, and it must be said that this position is very stupid, who all sit, form commissions, draw up plans – ad infinitum … The practical implementation of decrees, of which we have more than enough and which we bake with the haste portrayed by Mayakovsky, finds no verification.

(Lenin’s speech was published in Izvestia on March 8, 1922). Quoted from the book. V. I. Lenin, Poln. coll. cit., vol. 45, p. 13 – 15.

“They were sitting” made Vladimir Ilyich very amused, and he even repeated some lines, ”wrote Anatoly Lunacharsky. (quoted from the book by V. Katanyan “Mayakovsky. Literary Chronicle”, State Publishing House of Fiction, Moscow, 1961).

Mayakovsky spoke about the beginning of his work in Izvestia at the debate “Painful questions of the Soviet press” on December 14, 1925:

“I personally have never been admitted to Steklov. And I managed to get published only by chance, during his departure, thanks to Litovsky. And only after Lenin marked me, only then did Izvestia begin to print me.

They say that at first Yuri Mikhailovich Steklov was angry with his colleague for arbitrariness, but when he found out that Lenin himself liked Mayakovsky’s poem, he calmed down. For five years, about fifty publications of the poet appeared on the pages of Izvestia – poems, essays, advertising texts on a variety of topics. Vladimir Mayakovsky became a frequent guest of the editorial office.

“It is curious that Mayakovsky did not confine himself to submitting his poems to the set: late at night he appeared at the Izvestia printing house and read his poems again already on galleys or in a strip, often correcting them,” writes literary editor M. Singer in his memoirs. (quoted by M. Singer. “People and Events”).

“But although Lenin’s approval opened the way for Mayakovsky to the newspaper, this road was not smooth. In 1928, in the article “The workers and peasants do not understand you,” he wrote:

“YU. M. Steklov often frowned at the verses I brought to Izvestia:

– I don’t like them.

I think I answered correctly:

– It’s good that I’m not writing for you, but for the working youth who read Izvestia.

“… Surprising as it may seem,” O. Litovsky notes in his memoirs, “such a great erudite as Steklov, a comprehensively educated person, an excellent connoisseur of Russian and European literature, could not understand Mayakovsky’s innovative form and, together with all the townsfolk, evaluated the broken line of the poet as the desire to “drive” the line … He tried to “correct” it more than once.

(quoted from the journal “Questions of Literature”, No. 12, 1990, V. Arutcheva “Venerable employee of Izvestia”).

Mayakovsky valued his work in the newspaper and was even proud of it. In his autobiography, “I myself” noted as a significant fact:

“I began to write in Izvestia.

Later, in the poem “About this”, he called himself “a poet, a respected employee of Izvestia”.

The long-term collaboration of the editorial staff with the poet ended in 1927. After the publication in Novy Lef of the polemical poem “Letter from Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky to the writer Alexei Maksimovich Gorky” (I am very sorry, Comrade Gorky, / that you are not visible at the construction site of our days. / Do you think – from Capri, from the hill / Do you know better?) , which did not correspond to the official position regarding the return of the great proletarian writer to the USSR, Mayakovsky was refused a “home”, as they say.

From the memoirs of Varlam Shalamov:

“When Gorky was living in Capri and negotiations began on such a delicate matter as the return of Gorky to the Soviet Union, Mayakovsky published his letter to Gorky in Novy Lef.

Voronsky (Alexander Konstantinovich Voronsky – professional revolutionary, Bolshevik underground worker, party member since 1904, writer, literary critic. – S.I.) received a letter from Gorky that he, Gorky, would reconsider his decision to return if he was not guaranteed the exclusion of such demarches by anyone.

Voronsky replied that he had informed the members of the government about this and Alexey Maksimovich did not have to worry. Mayakovsky will be put in his place.” (V. Shalamov. Memoirs. Moscow, AST publishing house, 2001).

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo – https://en.wikipedia.org