Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna.

Born 8 October 1892 in Moscow into a comfortable life. Her father was a professor of
art history at the University of Moscow, and her mother a pianist. Marina had a halfsister and half-brother from her father's first marriage, and a full sister, Anastasia. When
Marina was four years old, her mother noted the child's ability to rhyme words and
suggested that she might become a poet. As a child, Tsvetaeva's family traveled
extensively abroad, and she attended schools in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. She
was an indifferent student in mathematics and science, but excelled in history, literature,
and languages. At age 16, she began studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Her first collection of poetry, "Evening Album", dealing with themes of her childhood
and youth, appeared in 1910. He work attracted the attention of poet and critic
Maximillian Voloshin, who befriended her.
She married Sergei Efron in 1912, and they had two daughters, Ariadna (Alya) and
Irina. She was ill-disposed to the Russian Revolution of 1917--not surprising, perhaps,
because her husband served as an officer in the White Army, while she remained in
Moscow. Her anti-Bolshevik sentiments are expressed in "The Swans' Camp", a lyrical
chronicle of the Civil War as viewed by the wife of a White Army officer. The "Swans"
of the title refer to the volunteers in the White Army. She suffered terribly in Moscow
under the famine conditions of the Civil War time. Irina died in 1920 of starvation. In
1922 Tsvetaeva emigrated to Berlin and Prauge, settling eventually in Paris in 1925. Her
son, Georgi, was born in 1925.
She published the collections "Verses to Blok" in 1922 and "After Russia" in 1928. She
addressed tragical classical themes in "Ariadne" in 1924 and "Phaedra" in 1927.
Tsvetaeva was a passionate woman who had many affairs. She often said that her main
passion was to communicate with people, that sexual relationships were necessary
because that was the only way to penetrate a person's soul.
In Paris, she was her family's sole source of income. She had a meager pension from
Czechoslovakia, and made some other money by her writings. She increasingly turned
to prose, which paid better.
In the 1930s, she felt increasingly alienated from emigre society and was severely
criticized for writing an admiring letter to Mayakovsky. After this, at least one emigre
paper refused to publish any more of her work. Tsvetaeva developed a nostalgia for
Russia, as expressed in the poems "Homesick for the Motherland" (1935) and
"Motherland" (1936). Meanwhile, her husband and daughter developed Soviet
sympathies. Efron actually began to work for the NKVD and was implicated in an
assassination. Efron and his daughter returned to the USSR in 1937. Tsvetaeva's last
cycle of poems, "Verses to the Czechs" (1938-1939) was a reaction to the Nazi
occupation of Czechoslovakia.
In 1939 Tsvetaeva also returned to Moscow with her son. As always, life was difficult
for her. Pasternak, with whom she had long maintained a correspondence, found her
occasional work as a translator, but most doors were closed to her. Efron and Alya were
arrested for espionage. (Alya's fiance was really an NKVD agent sent to spy on the

family.) As part of the evacuation of Moscow during World War II, Tsvetaeva and her
son were relocated to the remote town of Elabuga in the Tatar Autonomous Republic.
On 31 August 1941, forgotten and with only enough money left for one loaf of bread,
Tsvetaeva committed suicide by hanging herself.
Of her own poems, Tsvetaeva once said they are "little devils, bursting into the sanctum
of dreams and incense."
Pasternak wrote: "The greatest recognition and reevaluation of all awaits Tsvetaeva, the
outstanding poet of the twentieth century."

Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigorevich.

Born on 26 January (14 Jan, Old Style) 1891 in Kiev, the son of an engineer. Originally
given the name Eliyahu, Ilya had three older sisters. His father had no interest in Jewish
ritual, while his mother continued to observe religious customs. On this matter, Ilya
followed his father's example, and never learned Yiddish or Hebrew.
As a boy, Ilya was rather undisciplined and, by his own admission, "it was only chance
that I did not become a juvenile delinquent."
In 1895 the family moved to Moscow where his father was appointed manager of a
major brewery. The Moscow home of Lev Tolstoy adjoined the brewery, and young Ilya
would often see the elder writer strolling about.
Ilya enjoyed a relatively privileged lifestyle and attended the First Gymnasium where he
met and became friends with Nikolai Bakhunin, who was also a student. Ilya got
involved in politics and was in the crowds erecting barricades during the Revolution of
1905. In 1906 both Ehrenburg and Bukharin joined the Bolshevik organization.
Ehrenburg and Bukharin edited an underground journal, spoke at meetings, collected
funds, and organized a strike at a wallpaper factory. Ehrenburg also worked to establish
a Bolshevik cell in a soldiers' barracks.
In January 1908, the 17-year-old Ehrenburg was arrested. The police were not gentle
and broke several of his teeth. After five months in prison, Ehrenburg was allowed out
for medical reasons. However, instead of staying out of trouble, he resumed his illegal
political activities. His father intervened at this point, paying a deposit of 500 rubles to
get Ilya permission to go abroad for medical treatment. Ilya's mother wanted him to go
to Germany and resume his studies, but on 7 December 1908, the young Ehrenburg
arrived in Paris because, as he wrote in 1960, that's where Lenin was.
Ehrenburg immediately attended a meeting where Lenin spoke. As Ehrenburg recalled
years later:
He [Lenin] spoke very calmly, without melodrama and with a slightly ironical smile. ...
I was fascinated by his head. ... It made me think not of anatomy, but of architecture.
Eager to hear the impressions of a young person fresh from Russian, Lenin invited
Ehrenburg for a private dinner and conversation.
Soon, however, Ehrenburg's interest in politics began to wane, and he took to writing
poetry. Not ready to give up politics entirely, he took the recommendation of Lev
Kamenev to go to Vienna and work with Lev Trotsky.
In Vienna, Ehrenburg helped prepare copies of Pravda to be smuggled into Russia. He
had conversations with Trotsky about art. He found Trotsky to be dogmatic and
intolerant, calling the poets Ehrenburg admired "decadents" and "the product of political
reaction." This attitude depressed Ehrenburg, so he returned to Paris where he decided
to renounce politics and devote himself to literature.
With the help of poet Liza Polonskaya, Ehrenburg produced a few magazines
lampooning most of the revolutionary leaders, including Lenin, who, in one caricature,
was labeled a "chief janitor" (starshii dvornik). Lenin saw and was outraged by the

lampoon.
Living on an allowance sent by his father, Ehrenburg spent most of his time reading and
writing in the cafes. He developed a fascination for Catholicism and considered
converting and entering a Benedictine monastery.
Near the end of 1909, Ehrenburg met and fell in love with Katya Schmidt, an emigree
from St. Petersburg. On 25 March 1911, she gave birth to Ehrenburg's only child, Irina.
Ehrenburg was not prepared for the responsibilities of being a husband and father and
he never married Katya.
In 1910 Ehrenburg came up with enough money to publishe his first poetry collection,
Verses (Stikhi). It contained poems on themes of Catholicism and the Middle Ages. The
prominent Symbolist poet Valery Briusov found the work "elegant" and "beautiful. He
wrote:
Among our young poets, Ehrenburg is second only to Gumilev in his ability to construct
verses and derive effect from rhyme and the combination of sounds.
Gumilev, however, was unimpressed, stating that all he found in Ehrenburg's work was
"ungrammatical and unpleasant snobbism."
Ehrenburg's second volume of poetry was published in 1911. It again contained Catholic
poems, but also "To the Jewish People", a poem voicing despair over the historical
plight of the Jews. This volume was more to Gumilev's liking, and he wrote:
I. Ehrenburg has made great progress from the time of his first book's appearance. . . .
He has passed from the ranks of imitators into the ranks of apprentices and, even,
sometimes, steps forth on the path of independent creativity.
During this time, Ehrenburg spent most of his time at the cafe Rotonde, whose clientel
also included Picasso, Apollinaire, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Jean Cocteau, Modigliani,
and Marc Chagall.
In 1912, Ehrenburg, an official fugitive from Russian justice, applied for a commutation
of his sentence, knowing that the Tsar was likely to grant a broad amnesty in connection
with the 100th anniversary of Romanov rule. The request was denied.
In 1913, Ehrenburg helped edit two issues of the journal Helios, in which he wrote
glowingly about the verse of Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1914, he published an anthology of
his own translations of French poets, including Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire.
When World War I broke out, Ehrenburg tried to enlist in the French army, but he was
rejected as being too gaunt. Instead, Ehrenburg wound up working as a war
correspondent for the Russian papers Utro Rossii and Birzhoviye Vedomosti. His
reporting was intelligent, skeptical, and fair. His coverage of the French army's
shameless use of bewildered Senegalese troops in the most exposed positions so
infuriated the French government, that Ehrenburg was almost expelled from the country.
The war took a toll on Ehrenburg, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. He began to
yearn for his homeland, and after the February Revolution, he set back for Russia. He

arrived in Petrograd just after the July days. His political leanings at the time were in
favor of Kerensky, not the Bolsheviks. He moved on to Moscow where he met the
October Revolution by cowering in his room as street fighting raged outside his
window.
In early 1918, Ehrenburg published a collection of verse entitled A Prayer for Russia
(Molitva o Rossy). One work in this collection, "Judgment Day", makes Ehrenburg's
hostility to the Bolsheviks apparent. It features Red soldiers stopping to rape a woman
as they storm the Winter Palace. Mayakovsky denounced the collection as "tiresome
prose printed in verses" and Ehrenburg as "a frightened intellectual". Later (in 1921)
Ehrenburg himself dismissed the collection as "artistically weak and ideologically
impotent".
Throughout 1918 Ehrenburg wrote anti-Bolshevik articles, calling Lenin "a stocky bald
man" who resembles "a good-natured burgher." He called Kamenev and Zinoviev "high
priests" who "prayed to the god Lenin".
In 1919, things got too hot in Moscow for Ehrenburg, so he moved to his home town of
Kiev. He met and associated with various writers including Andrei Sobol and Osip
Mandelshtam. In August, Ehrenburg married a distant cousin named Lyubov
Mikhailovna Kozintseva. He took a job as head of the aesthetic education of juvenile
delinquents and seems to have done an admirable job.
In September 1919, the Whites took control of Kiev, and Ehrenburg resumed publishing
hate-filled anti-Bolshevik articles, calling Lenin's revolution a "drunken orgy", the
Bolsheviks "rapists and conquerors". This attitude, however, did not appease the fiercely
anti-Semitic Whites. They came looking for the Jew Ehrenburg at a newspaper office
once, but the printers hid him. So Ehrenburg fled to the Crimea with his wife and his
mistress and from there returned to Moscow.
Two weeks after his arrival in Moscow, Ehrenburg was arrested and accused of being an
agent of Wrangel. Four days later, however, he was released, probably through the
intervention of Bukharin.
Resuming his literary life, Ehrenburg hob-nobbed with the usual suspects--Andrei Bely,
Boris Pasternak, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip
Mandelstam, etc., etc. He was just barely surviving by doing readings and literary
reviews. Then he found a real job supervising the nation's children's theaters for the
Ministry of Education. His direct superior was Vsevolod Meyerhold.
Still, life was hard and, once again with Bukharin's help, Ehrenburg was one of the first
Soviet intellectuals to be granted a passport to travel abroad. Forced to leave his
mistress behind this time, Ehrenburg took his wife and set off for Paris in March 1921.
But in 1921, after only two weeks in the French capital, the French police grabbed
Ehrenburg and expelled from the country, never giving a reason.
Ehrenburg wound up in Belgium where he sat down and in 28 days turned out his first
novel The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenita and His Disciples (Neobychainiye
Pokhozhdeniye Khulio Khurenito). In the novel, the mysterious Mexican Julio Jurenito
meets up with a fictional Ilya Ehrenburg and several other disciples, who follow him on

a quest to disrupt Europe, undermining its myths and complacent assumptions about
religion, politics, love, marriage, art, socialism, and the rules of war. The Pope is
lampooned, as it the eternal internal bickering among socialist factions. Eerily, the Nazi
Final Solution is presaged as Julio sends out invitations to the extermination of the
Jewish tribe. In Moscow, Jurenito meets with a Bolshevik leader obviously meant to
represent Lenin. This fictional Lenin shows himself to be ruthless, vowing to
exterminate all enemies.
Julio Jurenito created an immediate sensation, winning universal praise, even from
Pravda. Bukharin wrote an introduction to the Soviet edition of the novel, calling it "a
most fascinating satire" that exposed "a number of comic and replusive sides to life
under all regimes. Evgeny Zamyatia noted in particular Ehrenburg's use of irony,
calling it a "European weapon" seldom used by Russians. He applauded Ehrenburg for
ridiculing all targets equally, and readily accepted Ehrenburg into the brotherhood of
heretics. Of Ehrenburg, Zamyatin wrote: He is, of course, a real heretic (and
therefore--a revolutionary). A genuine heretic has the same virtue as dynamite: the
explosion (creative) takes the line of most resistance.
In October 1921, Ehrenburg moved to Berlin, where the tempo of his literary output
increased. By 1923 he had produced three more novels. In Trust, D.E., American
millionaires finance a plan to destroy Europe with viruses and poison gas. The Love of
Jeanne Ney is the story of a love affair between a young, respectable French bourgeois
woman and a Russian Communist, who is sent to France on a subversive mission. He is
arrested on a murder charge and the only way to prove his innocence to to reveal his
true mission. He remains heroically silent and is sentenced to death. Jeanne sacrifices
her honor in a vain attempt to save her lover.
The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov (Zhizn i Gibel Nikolaya Kurbova) is about a
dedicated member of the Cheka who becomes disallusioned when the NEP is
announced, and he ends up killing himself. The novels were quite popular, but did have
their critics. Writing in the journal Na Postu ("On Guard"), Boris Volin denounced
Nikolai Kurbov as: ...nauseating literature that distorts revolutionary reality, libels,
exaggerates facts and types, and without stop and without a twitch of conscience
slanders, slanders, slanders the revolution, revolutionaries, Communists, and the party.
In early 1924, Ehrenburg spent several months touring the Soviet Union, giving lectures
and readings. He then returned to Paris and finished The Grabber (Rvach), which
Veniamin Kaverin was to call Ehrenburg's finest novel. It is the story of a SocialRevolutionary. When his party's revolt fails in 1918, he flees to Kiev. He survives the
Civil War and eventually makes his way back to Moscow as the NEP is in full swing.
But he no longer understands society's rules, gets arrested because of links to a currency
speculator, and commits suicide in jail.
On Portochnoi Lane (aka "A Street In Moscow") (V Portochnoi Pereulke, 1927) is a
graphic and often sordid account of daily life in a Moscow working class area during
the mid-1920s, as characters come to terms with changes brought by the Revolution.
That same year, Ehrenburg published White Coal, or the Tears of Werther, a collection
of essays on European culture and society.
Ehrenburg followed this with The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (Burnaya Zhizn

Lazika Roitshvantsa). The hero of this novel is a simple, good-natured Jew from
Belorussia who wanders to Moscow, Warsaw, Germany, France, England and Palestine,
suffering beatings, jailings, and indignities of all sorts wherever he goes. Official
Moscow was not pleased with this book, and even Ehrenburg's friend Bukharin called it
"one-sided literary vomit".
In 1928, he published Conspiracy of Equals (Zagovor Ravnykh), a historical novel
concerning the Babeuf movement in Revolutionary France, which rejected terror and
advocated an egalitarian democracy. Stalin did not like this work, dismissing it as "pulp
literature" suitable for "a real bourgeois chamber theater."
In the face of the increasing criticism from Moscow, Ehrenburg gradually began to shift
his writings into a more openly pro-Soviet direction. He wrote about European peasants,
blasted Poland's authoritarian rule and France's racist colonialism. He undertook a series
of stories and novels exposing the greed of noted wealthy entrepreneurs. The Life of the
Automobile focused on Andre Citroen, Pierpont Morgan, and Henry Ford. The Shoe
King attacked Tomas Bata, a Czech footwear capitalist. Factory of Dreams takes on
Hollywood, George Eastman, and the Kodak camera. The Single Front takes as its target
Ior Kreuger, the Swedish Match King. The capitalists were not amused. Bata sued
Ehrenburg, and Kreuger opened a public relations war against the writer. Moscow
wasn't particularly thrilled either, however. While these books exposed abused of
capitalism, they failed to suggest communist as the solution to these ills. The 1931
edition of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia described Ehrenburg thusly: He ridicules
Western capitalism and the bourgeoisie with genuine wit. But he does not believe in
communism or the proletariat's creative strength.
In 1931 Ehrenburg visited Germany twice. The rise of Nazism which he saw there
gravely disturbed him. It seemed to him that war was inevitable and he could no longer
remain an uncommitted skeptic because, as he wrote later, "Between us and the Fascits
there was not even a narrow strip of no-man's land."
In 1932, Ehrenburg became a reporter for Izvestiya, covering the trial of a deranged
Russian emigre who had assassinated the French President. In addition, his articles were
persistent and clear in calling attention to the danger of the rise of fascism.
Later that year, Ehrenburg returned to the Soviet Union. He spent weeks in Siberia,
touring construction sites in Sverdlovsk, Tomsk, and Kuznetsk. Upon his return to Paris,
Ehrenburg penned The Second Day (Den Vtoroi), sometimes translated as "Out of
Chaos". It is a day-to-day account of the harsh conditions of life and heroic efforts of
workers to overcome nature's resistance as they built a blast furnace in Kuznetsk. In the
novel, a weak dreamer tries to fit in with the more dedicated workers but fails. He
becomes complicit in an act of vandalism. Ashamed of his own spiritual bankruptcy, he
commits suicide. This work was Ehrenburg's attempt to reestablish himself politically in
the Soviet Union. At first, publication was rejected. But Ehrenburg sent copies to Stalin
and other members of the Politburo. He got lucky, and publication was approved.
Also in 1932 Ehrenburg also produced the novel Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
(Moskva Slezam ne Verit) about the difficulties of a Russian artist who has the
opportunity to study in Paris. The artist is attacked by a critic at home who denounces
his work as degenerate and bourgeois. In this work, Ehrenburg makes the point of

comparing western capitalist society is to a lavatory in a fifth-rate Paris hotel.

In 1934, Ehrenburg convinced French writer Andre Malraux to accompany him back to
the Soviet Union to attend the first Soviet Writers' Congress. Ehrenburg was on the
presidium of the Congress and chaired several of its sessions. In his main speech to the
Congress, he defended the need for books that appealed only to "the intelligentsia and
an elite among the workers" and may not be understandable to the broad masses. He
spoke in praise of Isaak Babel and Boris Pasternak and added his voice to the pleas for
greater tolerance of artistic literature.
In 1934 Ehrenburg also completed the novel Without Taking Breath (Ne Perevodya
Dikhaniya), which centers on heroic efforts to develop a modern timber industry in the
far north. The novel also describes the wholesale destruction of wooden churches from
the 17th and 18th centuries and the neglect of tradtional Russian lace-making in the
region.
Ehrenburg was a participant and one of the principal organizers of the International
Writers' Congress in Defense of Culture, which began its work on 21 June 1935. The
goal of the congress was to organize a broad anti-fascist coalition of writers from a wide
range of perspectives--liberal, socialist, communist, Christian, and Surrealist.
In fall of 1935, Ehrenburg made a quick trip back to Moscow. While there, he gave
speeches and wrote articles in praise of Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Dovzhenko, and
the independence of art. This resulted in some criticism of Ehrenburg. Vera Inber, for
example, rebuked him for implying that only Pasternak had a conscience among Soviet
poets.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in summer 1936, Ehrenburg immediately dashed
to Spain to report on the war, disobeying instructions from Izvestiya, which wanted him
to stay put in Paris. His reporting was intelligent and passionate, maintaining a constant
drumbeat of anti-Fascism. While in Spain, Ehrenburg also got to meet yet another
literary luminary--Ernest Hemingway. By 1937, he put together a book of sketches on
the war entitled What A Man Needs.
In December 1937, Ehrenburg had a really stupid idea: he went to Moscow for a short
vacation at the height of the terror campaign. His friends back in Moscow couldn't
believe how foolhardy he was to return at a time when writers were being arrested right
and left. He expected to return to Spain after two weeks, but authorities told him this
would not be possible. On the orders of Stalin, he was given a ticket to attend the trial of
his old friend Nikolai Bukharin. Izvestia wanted him to write an article on the trial, but
Ehrenburg adamately refused. Unknown to Ehrenburg at the time, Karl Radek, one of
the Bukharin's co-defendants, had revealed under "interrogation" that Ehrenburg had
been present while Radek and Bukharin were plotting their coup.
Fearful and tired of waiting, Ehrenburg sent an appeal to Stalin, asking to be sent back
to Spain. The request was refused. Knowing that he was being extremely foolhardy,
Ehrenburg decided to "play the lottery" and sent a second appeal to Stalin which--no
one knows why--was granted this time.
Back in Europe, Ehrenburg continued writing dispatches from Spain and France. Then

he suffered a severe shock in August 1939 with the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin
pact. He was so shaken that for eight months he could only take in liquids and chew on
herbs and vegetables. He lost 40 pounds. In Moscow, Ehrenburg's reputation suffered.
HIs dacha in Peredelkino was handed over to Valentin Kataev.
Following the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, Ehrenburg's health returned.
He set to work trying to assist elements of the French government which still hoped to
resist Germany. For this, the French government arrested Ehrenburg, although he was
shortly released on the order of the Minister of the Interior. After the Germans occupied
Paris, Ehrenburg left for Russia. When he arrived at the train station in Moscow there
was no one from the Writers' Union on hand to greet him. When Ehrenburg turned 50 in
January 1941, not a single Soviet newspaper took note of the fact. Anti-fascism was no
longer in vogue.
Because of the Soviet-Nazi alliance, Izvestia no longer printed Ehrenburg's articles,
knowing his anti-Fascist sentiments. He did manage to print a series of articles in the
newspaper Trud, which, despite numerous cuts and amendments, made his unpopular
position clear.
In early 1941 Ehrenburg completed the first part of his novel The Fall of Paris
(Padeniye Parizha), covering France in the prewar years and the French decision not to
intervene in Spain. There were no Germans in the story yet, and by changing the word
"fascist" to "reactionary", the journal Znamya was able to print the work. The second
part of the novel, however, was rejected. Undeterred, Ehrenburg sent a manuscript to
Stalin, who then telephoned Ehreburg signalling his approval. The rest of the novel was
published, and various journals started calling Ehrenburg with solicitations. In April
1942, the novel won the Stalin Prize.
When Hitler staged the sneak attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Ehrenburg was
released as a ferocious literary weapon of war. During the war, he wrote over two
thousand articles, mainly for the paper Krasnaya Zvezda. He gained credibility and
popularity among the troops by frankly assessing German strength and admitting Soviet
losses as well as expressing fierce hatred for the enemy. In one of his most famous
articles he wrote:
Now we understand the Germans are not human. Now the word "German" has become
the most terrible curse. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do
not kill a German, a German will kill you. He will carry away your family, and torture
them in his damned Germany. If you have killed one German, kill another.
Soldiers loved his articles. An order was passed not to use copies of Ehrenburg's articles
for rolling cigarettes. Molotov reported that Ehrenburg "was worth several divisions".
On May Day 1944, Ehrenburg received the Lenin Prive for his wartime efforts.
At least one Soviet officer, however, felt that Ehrenburg's articles went too far and
incited Soviet troops to senseless violence, killing Germans trying to surrender. This
officer, Lev Kopelev, was arrested and charged with "bourgeois propaganda" and "pity
for the enemy".
At one point, Ehrenburg got in a dispute with Krasnaya Zvezda over editing his articles.

Stalin intervened, saying "There is no need to edit Ehrenburg. Let him write as he
pleases."
A true European snob, Ehrenburg was completely dismissive of the American war
effort. According to Harrison Salibury, Ehrenburg thought Americans were "a naive,
ignorant, uneducated colonial people who had no appreciation for European culture."
American reporter Henry Shapiro wrote that Ehrenburg claimed the only contributions
Americans ever made to civilization where Hemingway and Chesterfield cigarettes,
which Ehrenburg was constantly trying to bum.
A true Soviet man in his writing, Ehrenburg nonetheless refused to wear Soviet
underwear and insisted that he wife keep mending his old French knickers instead.
During the war, Ehrenburg and fellow writer Vasily Grossman undertook a project that
was to be called The Black Book. Under their direction, over twenty writers worked to
document the horrors suffered by Soviet Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. At first, the
project was endorsed by the official Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Later, however,
offical policy toward the Jews changed. The book was criticized for giving attention to
traitors and collaborators among the Ukrainians and Lithuanians and publication
became impossible.
As the war approached its conclusion, Ehrenburg noted and spoke out against excesses
of looting and rape committed by Soviet troops. Stalin was informed of these remarks,
and on 14 April 1945 a severe rebuke of Ehrenburg appeared in Pravda. Ehrenburg was
accused of "simplifying" the political situation and of calling for the extermination of
the German people. Ehrenburg wrote to Stalin, justifying himself and pointing out the
misinterpretations in the Pravda article, but he never received a reply.
After the war, Ehrenburg took a triumphal tour of Europe. Then, in 1946 he visited the
United States along with Konstantin Simonov and another writer named Mikhail
Galaktionov. He of course met luminaries: Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, John Steinbeck,
Paul Robeson, Albert Einstein. He grudgingly came to admire America's technology,
privately admitting to a friend that "Europe was two hundred years behind the United
States." But his impression of Americans as crass and boorish remained.
Once back in Moscow, Ehrenburg quickly jumped into the cold war propaganda battle.
He denounced the United States' Voice of America broadcasts in an article entitled
"False Voice". In a small volume named In America he attacked the racial problems in
the U.S. And in 1948 he wrote a play, Lion in the Square (Lev na Ploshchadi), a
blistering, vicious attack on the behavior of Americans in post-war Europe. In 1949 he
prepared a rather hysterical piece of anti-American propaganda named Nights of
America. While consistent with Soviet attitudes at the time, it was, for some unknown
reason, never published.
In 1948, Ehrenburg produced the novel Storm (Burya) about World War II with action
set both in the Soviet Union and in France. It described the enormous efforts of the Red
Army to defeat Nazi Germany. While it contained descriptions of the massacres of Jews
at Babi Yar, portrayed a shocking liaison between a Russian and a French actress
(marriages with foreigners were illegal at the time), and made an oblique jibe at the
Hitler-Stalin pact, it nonetheless won the Stalin Prize.

Ehrenburg contributed to the cult of the personality, heaping praise on Stalin when and
where appropriate. But occasionally he made small but noticeable gestures of a different
nature. In 1947, despite Akhmatova's official status as an outcast, Ehrenburg went to
visit her in Leningrad. When Andrei Zhdanov died in 1948, a tribute to him appeared in
Literaturnaya Gazeta above the signatures of several prominent writers. Ehrenburg's
name, however, was missing. In 1949 he hired a secretary whose father was in a labor
camp.
In 1949, Ehrenburg came close to extinction again as Stalin unleashed an anti-Jewish
campaign. His work stopped appearing, and his name was removed from other articles.
Perhaps somewhat prematurely, a Moscow party activist announced to a meeting that
"cosmopolitan number one" [Ehrenburg] had been exposed and arrested. Ehrenburg
wrote an appeal to Stalin. As a result, he received a reassuring phone call from
Malenkov, and his works were again published.
Ehrenburg was then dispatched as a Soviet delegate to the World Peace Congress in
Paris. Also in 1949, he was elected to the Congress of Nationalities by a district in Riga,
Latvia. He was to remain a deputy until his death.
In 1950 Ehrenburg went on a propoganda junket to western Europe. For the first time,
by his own admission, Ehrenburg was made to sweat by the hard-hitting questions of
western journalists, particularly on questions relating to the Jewish situation. He tried to
answer with ambiguities and generalities without having to resort to outright lies. But in
this, he was not always successful.
Ehrenburg's next novel was Ninth Wave (1951), a crude propaganda novel about the
Peace Movement and the Cold War. Later it was renounced by Ehrenburg, who refused
to have it included in his Collected Works.
Anti-Jewish hysteria reached a new high in January 1953 with the announcement of the
so-called Doctors' Plot. In mid-February, Ehrenburg and many other prominent Jews
were asked to sign an open letter to Stalin acknowledging the passions aroused by the
Doctors' Plot and asking Stalin to round up all the Jews and send them to Siberia for
their own safety. Dozens of Jewish writers, artists and musicians, including Vasily
Grossman and Margaritat Aliger--all terrified--signed the letter. Ehrenburg refused three
times. He then wrote a letter to Stalin arguing not the morality of the idea, but worrying
that shipping all the Jews off to Siberia would be a public relations disaster for the
Soviet Union in the eyes of the West. Fortunately for everyone, Stalin suddenly died and
the whole idea was forgotten.
Shortly after Stalin's funeral, Ehrenburg quickly changed his tune. Instead of calling for
orthodoxy, he wrote an article ("On the Role of the Writer") defending an artist's right to
create according to his or her own inner voice, not according to some plan or directive.
Then, in 1954, he published a novel that was to give its name to an entire era of Soviet
history: The Thaw (Ottepel'). There is not much action in The Thaw, consisting mainly
of interior monologues of a wide range of characters most of whom---willingly or
unwillingly--are living inner personal lives at odds with their outer, public lives. The
wife of an unimaginative but successful factory director struggles with her growing
alienation from her husband. Others struggle to keep love out of their souls because it

conflicts with their duties to the factory and to the Party. A talented artist who
squandered his talent and became a hack for the sake of success struggles to maintain
his cynical outlook so he won't have to face his own spiritual bankruptcy. But as the
cold winter passes and the spring thaw comes, a change is beginning--loves and
childlike exuberances with all their unexplainable contradictions are blossoming out
into the open, with no regard to poltical correctness. Stalin and his passing are nowhere
referred to in the work, but the time frame of the action is clear to the readers. Explosive
for its time as well were passing references to the injustices of the terror and the absurd
Doctors' Plot.
Conservatives did not like The Thaw. Konstantin Simonov criticized it in an article in
Literaturnaya Gazeta. Mikhail Sholokhov criticized Simonov for not being harsh
enough in criticizing Ehrenburg.
Ehrenburg worked to ressurect Babel's reputation, writing an introduction to a collection
of Babel stories which, after some struggle, was published in 1957. He did the same for
a collection of Tsvetaeva and continued his vocal support for Pasternak as well as some
of the better know of the repressed Jewish writers. He worked on a committee looking
into the possibility of republishing the work of Boris Pilnyak. As a member of the
editorial board of the journal Foreign Literature (Inostrannaya Literatura) he pushed for
publication of the works of Hemingway and Faulkner. Ehrenburg was also instrumental
in organizing the first-ever exhibit of Picasso's works in Moscow in 1956. Ten years
later, in 1966, it was Ehrenburg who flew to France to award Picasso the Lenin Peace
Prize.
In 1957 Ehrenburg penned an influential essay, "The Lessons of Stendhal". Ehrenburg
used Stendhal's remarks about tyranny as a not-too-subtle swipe at renewed calls for
conformity and limits for writers.
When Yevgeny Yevtushenko came under attack for his poem "Babi Yar" in 1961,
Ehrenburg rode to his defense by writing a letter to the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta.
On his seventieth birthday in 1961, Ehrenburg was awarded his second Order of Lenin
and a gala celebration in his honor was held at the Writers' Union. In his remarks at the
party, Ehrenburg posited his belief that writers are not so much "engineers of the soul"
as "teachers of life".
In 1960, Ehrenburg began publishing the first chapters of his memoirs, People, Years,
Life (Liudi, Gody, Zhizn). In the pages of this book he revived the names of many
writers who had disappeared in the purges. He frankly admitted that he was aware of the
injustices going on in the 1930s and that he participated in the grand "conspiracy of
silence." Conservative critics were not pleased. Vsevolod Kochetov denouced:
...morose compilers of memoirs...who rake around in their confused memories in order
to drag out mouldering literary corpses into the light of day and present them as
something still capable of living.
Attempts were made by those close to the government to discredit Ehrenburg, citing his
confession of "silence" as an admission that he was a collaborator in the repressions.
Everyone else, it was claimed, heaped praise on Stalin because they believed-mistakenly--that Stalin was telling the truth. If Ehrenburg--unlike everyone else--knew

that injustices were being committed, his silence was immoral and his praise of Stalin
makes him a downright dirty liar. That was the argument, but nobody believed it. Even
Sholokhov, always hostile to Ehrenburg, dismissed it.
With each new chapter of his memoirs, publication became more and more difficult.
Ehrenburg was forced to make many changes and deletions. Explicit references to
Bukharin were forbidden. At one point, further publication seemed impossible when
Ehrenburg was subjected to fierce criticism from both Party ideologist Leonid Ilichev
and boss Khrushchev. But as in so many things, Khrushchev later changed his mind,
blaming everything on somebody else. People, Years, Life resumed publication, albeit
with a preface from the publisher accusing Ehrenburg of "violations of historical truth."
Ehrenburg lent support to younger writers. He signed a letter in support of Iosif
Brodsky, counseled Andrei Voznesensky on how best to avoid complications, protested
against the sentences given to Sinyavsky and Danil, and expressed positive views about
Solzhenitsyn, although the future renegade lated lied about this, claiming that
Ehrenburg "hated" his work.
Ehrenburg continued to work on his memoirs until just weeks before his death.
Following the writers's death, Andrei Tarkovsky tried to get these final pages published,
but authorities demanded so many cuts and revisions, that the writer's family withdrew
the manuscript rather than see an eviscerated version printed. It wasn't until 1990 that
these pages were finally published
Beset with prostate and bladder cancer, Ilya G. Ehrenburg died on 31 August 1967.
Besides his undeniable talent as a writer, Ehrenburg had a remarkable ability to survive.
According to the logic of the times through which he lived, Ehrenburg should have been
executed at least three or four times. But, as Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, Ehrenburg
"taught us all how to survive." A life full of changes and contradictions surely was his.
But perhaps Ehrenburg himself described it best in his memoirs:
If within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times, almost as often
as his suits, he still does not change his heart; he has but one.
Sources: Rubenstein, Joshua. "Tangle Loyalties: The Life and Times oF Ilya
Ehrenburg". Basic Books. 1996. Goldberg, Anatol. "Ilya Ehrenburg, Revolutionary,
Novelist, Poet, War Correspondent, Propagandist: The Extraordinary Epic of a Russian
Survivor." Viking Press. 1984

Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich..

Born 19 July (7 July, Old Style) 1893 in Bagdadi, Georgia (which was later named
Mayakovsky in his honor). His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich, though of noble
ancestry, was a forest ranger. The young Vladimir had two older sister--Olga and
Lyudmila. He began school in Kutais in 1902, but took little interest in studies. By the
time he was in third grade, Mayakovsky found himself thrilled by the excitement of
mass meetings, demonstrations, and revolutionary songs. Lyudmila, now a student in
Moscow, would bring home legal and illegal political pamphlets.
In 1906 the elder Mayakovsky died of blood poisoning. Mayakovsky's mother,
Aleksandra Alekseevna, decided to move the family to Moscow to stay close to
Lyudmila. To help support the family, Olga and the young Vladimir learned to fire and
color wooden objects, such as boxes, caskets and Easter eggs, which Lyudimila would
sell to stores.
Mayakovsky plunged himself into politics almost as soon as he arrived in Moscow. By
the time he was 14, he was a full-fledged member of the Moscow Bolshevik Party,
serving as a messenger, distributor of leaflets, and lookout. On 1 March 1908,
Mayakovsky was expelled from school for non-payment of fees. And on 29 March 1908
he was caught with a stack of revolutionary proclamations and arrested. Mayakovsky
was released on probation, and on 30 August 1908 he was admitted to the Stroganov
School of Industrial Arts.
Mayakovsky was arrested again on 21 January 1909--this time by mistake. He was seen
in the company of some Social Revolutionaries who were accused of exproriations
(bank robberies). Mayakovsky's innocence was apparent, and was released.
However, by summer of 1909 Mayakovsky was back in the slammer, this time because
he walked into a stakeout aimed at a Georgian revolutionary involved in expropriations
and the organization of a successful prison break. Mayakovsky was an uncooperative
prisoner. A warder's report in August 1909 states:
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky...by his behavior incites other prisoners to
disobedience toward prison officers, persistently demands free access to all cells,
purporting to be the prisoners' "spokesman"; whenever let out of his cell to go to the
toilet or washroom, he stays out of his cell for half an hour, parading up and down the
corridor.
Mayakovsky was moved from prison to prison and eventually wound up in solitary
confinement in cell 103 of Butyrki Prison. It was here that he wrote his first poem.
Mayakovsky was tried in September 1909 and found guilty. However, being a minor, he
again got off with probation.
Having already shown a talent for drawing, Mayakovsky dropped out of politics and
decided to study art. In 1911 he gained admission to the Moscow Institute for the Study
of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. And this time, his studies were successful.
Here he met and fell under the influence of the avantgard painter David Burliuk, who
introduced Mayakovsky to modernist painting and poetry. In September of 1912, after
abandoning a boring program of Rakhkmaninov music, Mayakovsky penned and read
for Burliuk a poem. Burliuk supposedly exclaimed, "Why, you're a poetic genius!" And

at this moment, Mayakovsky claims, he decided to pursue only poetry.

In December 1912, Mayakovsky, Burliuk, Khlebnikov, and Kruchenykh published a
Futurist manifesto entitled , A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. In it, they demanded that
Pushkin, Tolstoy, etc., be thrown overboard. After all, "The Academy and Pushkin are
less intelligible than hieroglyphics.". Blok, Gorky, Kuprin, Remizov, Bunin and others
also come in for scorn, being labeled as "insignificant". The manifesto "orders" respect
for the poets' rights:

To enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative
words.
To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.
To push with horror off their proud brow the Wreath of cheap fame that You
have made from bathhouse switches.
To stand on the rock of the word "we" amidst the sea of boos and outrage.

Mayakovsky's first two published poems, Noch ("Night") and Utro ("Morning") also
appeared in 1912.
To advertise their "happenings", the futurists engaged in various stunts: Mayakovsky
appearing in a yellow jacket, and Burliuk with a tree branch and bird painted on his
cheek. These stunts got to the two expelled from the Institute.
In 1913, Mayakovsky, Burliuk, Khlebnikov, and other Futurists undertook a tour of the
provinces to call attention to their new style. Mayakovsky was the star of these shows,
not only because of his booming bass voice and exciting style of reading, but also
because of his natural talent as a debater and ability to engage in witty repartee.
Back in Moscow, Mayakovsky produced his first collection, entitled humbly enough,
"I", and a play called: Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. The play was staged in
December 1913 with--you guessed it--Vladimir Mayakovsky in the title role. Basically,
the play is a series of image-laden monologues concerning the poet and his perceptions.
In it, the Poet is both idealized and debunked. Adoring women bring him their tears as
gifts, begging him to accept them; and yet he sleeps on a bed of dung, waiting for the
wheels of the train to come and slice off his head. In the Prologue, Mayakovsky
declares:
I will reveal to you with words that are simple, like lowing, our new souls, glowing like
the arcs of streetlights. I'll lightly touch your heads with my fingers, and you will grow
lips for enormous kisses and a tongue, to all nations native. And I, hobbling on my mean
soul, will depart for my throne with starry holes hung across the tattered vault. I'll lie
down, bright, in my clothes of sloth, on a soft bed of bona fide dung, and quiet, kissing
railroad-tie knees, the steam engine wheel will grab my neck and squeeze.
Viktor Shklovsky described the play thusly:
The poet has spread himself out on the stage, holding himself in hand as a card player
holds his cards. Here's Mayakovsky the deuce, the three, the jack, the king. The game is
staked on love. The game is lost.
The main reaction of the public to the play was derision.
World War I broke out in 1914, but as the only son of a widow, Mayakovsky was at first

exempt from the draft. He was eventually drafted but never really performed any
military duty.
His first major long poem, Oblako v Shanakh ("A Cloud in Trousers") appeared in 1915.
It is a tale of love and poetry in bold, novel, jarring images, using a "depoetisized"
language of the streets. In it, Mayakovsky scorns the lofty image of the poet; he refuses
to be "sweet. Not a man, but a cloud in trousers." Instead, the author says he is merely a
human, "spit from the filthy night on the palm of a beggar." Poetry does not come easy.
Rather, writing poetry, coming from the "silly fish of imagination", causes "blisters on
the brain". He describes the poets' work:
Then after they clear the rhymes
while boiling a soup with birds and flowers
the tongue dumb on the dusty road is dragged
Because it has no way to speak, shout
Mayakovsky also brings revolution into the work:
Take your hands off the pockets pedestrians!
grab stones, bombs, knifes, whatever you can find
and those of you who have no hands
hit with the forehead.
March you o hungry ones
crooked,
skinny dirty, full of parasites
march!
In the summer of 1915, Mayakovsky met the great love of his life--Lilya Birk. Her
husband, Osip, apparently did not object to the affair, and in fact soon became
Mayakovsky's publisher and literary collaborator. The poem Fleytapozvonochik ("The
Backbone Flute") (1916), was dedicated to Lilya. He finished out the pre-Revolutionary
years with Voina i Mir ("War and the World"), a reaction to the horrors of war, and
Chelovek ("Man"), touching on cosmic anguish caused by frustrated love. This latter
work is set first on present day earth, then in heaven, and then back on the earth of the
future, where the greedy philistine still rules.
"Mayakovsky entered the Revolution as he would enter his own home," Shklovsky
noted. He went to the Smolny in Petrograd and was an eyewitness to the Bolshevik
coup. Red sailors marched on the Winter Palace chanting one of Mayakovsky's slogans:
Yesh ananasy, ryabchiki zhui
Dyeh tvoi posledni prikhodit, burzhui!
("Eat pineapples, chew on quail
Your last day is coming, bourgeois!")
While Mayakovsky produced a voluminous amount of slogans, posters and placards on
political and utilitarian topics for the Revolutionary government, he still insisted that the
new times demanded new artistic forms. Hence, he had little use for Prolekult poets and
their conventional style. He dismissed them as those "who put patches on Pushkin's
faded dresscoat."

To honor the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, legendary director Vsevolod
Meyerhold presented Mayakovsky's next play, Mysteriya Buff ("Mystery Bouffe"), a
portrayal of the triumph of the "Unclean" (proletarians) over the "Clean" (Bourgeoise).
Mayakovsky himself played a major role in the production. Subsequent productions of
the play in 1920 and 1921 were filled with acrobatics and circus tricks and used up to
350 actors and dancers. Mayakovsky also produced poems of a obviously political bent
such as Oda Revolutsii ("Ode to the Revolution") (1918) and Levy Marsh ("Left
March") (1919).
In 1918, Mayakovsky began a brief plunge into film. He wrote the scenario for and
starred in Ne Dlya Deneg Rodivshisya ("Not For Money Born"), based on Jack
London's novel Martin Eden. The film was popular with the Soviet public, as was his
second film Baryshnya i Khuligan ("The Lady and the Hooligan"), although
Mayakovsky later called it "sentimental nonsense". In his third film, Zakovannaya
Filmoi ("Fettered by Film"), Mayakovsky played a painter with Lilya Birk as his
leading lady. In all, Mayakovsky wrote thirteen film scenarios, most of which were
never produced. And only bits and pieces of those films that were produced survive.
In 1921, Mayakovsky produced the epic propaganda-art poem 150,000,000, an allegory
of the decisive battle between 150,000,000 Soviet workers and the evil forces of
capitalism, led by Woodrow Wilson. In style, the poem parodies the Russian bylina, or
folk epic. This work, however, pleased neither the artistic community--Boris Pasternak
in particular--nor the political reader. Lenin himself wrote a memo to Lunacharsky,
criticizing the publication of 150,000,000. Lenin called the poem, "stupid, monstrously
stupid, and pretentious." He also suggested that Lunacharsky be "whipped for futurism."
Mayakovsky took his first trip abroad in May 1922 to Riga, Latvia. He was scheduled to
give a public lecture, but the local police chief, aware of Mayakovsky's political views,
refused to grant permission. Mayakovsky responded with some vicious verse satire,
ridiculing all aspects of life in the tiny republic. Later in 1922 he visited Berlin and
Paris, where he met with Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Braque, and Leger and attended the
funeral of Marcel Proust.
Upon his return to Moscow, Mayakovsky set about establishing the avant-garde jouranl
Left Front, or more simply, Lef. The first issue appeared in March 1923 and the last
(seventh) in June 1925. It featured works by Pasternak, Kamensky, Aseev, Kruchonykh,
Khlebnikov, Babel, Shklovsky, Osip Brik, Meyerhold, Vertov, Eisenstein and
Rodchenko. The premier issue of the journal contained Mayakovsky's own Pro Eto
("About That"), an allegoric outpouring of love and suffering, filled with surrealist
visions.
And, as before, Mayakovsky continued to draw political posters and compose countless
slogans and jingles for products or as public service messages, reminding people not to
smoke or drink or spit on the floor and that they should wash and brush their teeth
regularly.
Mayakovsky was profoundly moved when Lenin died on 21 January 1924. During that
year, while reading and lecturing throughout the Soviet Union, Mayakovsky worked on
his 3,000-line tribute Vladimir Ilych Lenin, in which he proclaimed that "Lenin, even
now, is more alive than the living".

Mayakovsky took two more trips to Paris--in October 1924 and May 1925. On the latter
journey, he attended the opening of the Soviet pavilion at the Exhibition of Industrial
Arts, where his own advertising posters received the Silver Medal. He then sailed across
the Atlantic for his own discovery of America. He landed first in Cuba, where U.S.
domination led him to write Black And White, in support of the struggle against racism.
He then moved on to Mexico where he met fellow moderninst and communist Diego
Rivera. Then, in July 1925, after being put behind bars for eight hours by U.S.
authorities in Texas, Mayakovsky finally entered the United States. He visited New
York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, giving readings and
lectures and joining in the workers' struggle. (He once spent a whole day on the picket
line with New York garment workers.) The result of the trip was Mayakovsky's cycle
Stikhi ob Ameriki ("Poems of America"), including Bruklinski Most ("The Brooklyn
Bridge"), as well as a rather caustic prose travelogue, Moyo Otkrytiye Ameriki ("My
Discovery of America"; 1926).
In 1925 Mayakovsky also made one of his few forays into the sphere of utopian science
fiction with his poem Letaiushchi Proletarii ("The Flying Proletarian"). As described by
Victor Tarras in his biography of Mayakovsky, The Flying Proletarian was:
...set in the year 2125 and features a giant air battle, with death rays and such, between
the Soviet proletarian and the American bourgeois air forces. The latter prevails until an
uprising of New York workers against their government turns the tide. Mayakovsky's
communist future is all comfort and electric ease: electric razors, electric toothbrushes,
everybody with his own private airplane (Moscow no longer has any streets, just
airports). Labor is wholly mechanized, so that a worker merely operates a keyboard.
Altogether, Mayakovsky's utopia is written from the viewpoint of a laborer who is tired
of backbreaking, dirty work. . . . There are no kitchens, no housework. People eat in
aerocafeterias and amuse themselves with cosmic cinemas, cosmic dances, and such--all
nonalcoholic (alcohol is served by prescription only). The sport of the future is aviopolo--football has long since been abandoned as crude and boring.
On a much more serious note, following the suicide of poet Sergei Esenin on 27
December 1925, Mayakovsky set himself the task of neutralizing the effect of Esenin's
sucide note-poem and of making Esenin's end seem uninspiring. He wanted to put
forward another kind of beauty in place of the easy beauty of death. Mayakovsky had
never been a big fan of Esenin and his more conventional style, but he did recognize
Esenin as "a journeyman of the Russian word." Esenin had concluded his suicide poem
with the lines: "In this life, dying is nothing new. But living, of course, isn't any newer."
In response, Mayakovsky ended his poem Sergeiu Eseninu ("To Sergei Esenin") with
this variation:
In this life, to die is not so difficult,
to make life is considerably more difficult.
As the Soviet Union prepared to mark its tenth anniversary in 1927, Mayakovsky was
making his contribution with Khorosho! Oktyabrskaya Poema ("Good! A Poem of the
October Revolution"). This work retells the history of the Soviet Union, beginning with
a description of the unrest of early 1917 and a lampoon of the Kerensky government. It
contains a triumphant account of the storming of the Winter Palace; episodes concerning
the fight against counterrevolution, foreign intervention, cold and hunger; the
assassination attempt on Lenin; and the final defeat of the Whites. The poem also
contains a swipe at poet Aleksandr Blok, who is portrayed as warming himself over a

fire and waiting for the arrival of Jesus Christ, a reference to the end of Blok's poem The
Twelve.
Also, in January 1927, Mayakovsky revived Lef, this time under the name Novy Lef
("New Lef"). In the premerie issue, Mayakovsky entered into a public dispute with
Maksim Gorky, who was living abroad in Italy at the time. It came in the form of an
open letter-poem to Gorky, calling on him to return to the Soviet Union. Mayakovsky
also took the opportunity to insult another writer and protege of Gorky, Fyodor
Gladkov, author of the popular novel Cement. Mayakovsky saw the realism of Gladkov
and others like him as the mere "adaptability" and "fawning" of lickspittles.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Mayakovsky fell into disfavor with certain writers,
especially those of the Pereval and RAPP groups. They attacked Mayakovsky as a
bombastic hack writer, lacking in discipline and class consciousness and burdened with
a "harmful, muddled ideology".
The first Five Year Plan began in 1928 and the push for collectivization in 1929.
Mayakovsky rushed around visiting building sites and new factories and producing
poems addressing specific issues of current public interest: the joy of a new apartment
with hot and cold running water; the purchase of industrialization bonds; and the
promise of automobile factories to produce affordable automobiles which will be
available on the installment plan. But Mayakovsky didn't wait for these auto factories to
get his own car. Rather, while in Paris in 1928, he purchased a new Renault.
During that same trip to Paris, Mayakovsky had been commissioned by Comrade
Kostrov, the editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda and Molodaya Gvardia, to compose
some political poems. However, Mayakovsky struck up an affair with a beautiful
Russian emigree and instead composed his Pismo Tovarishchy Kostrovu iz Parizha o
Sushchenosti Liubvi ("Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris Concerning the Nature of
Love").
Upon his return to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked with Meyerhold again preparing the
production of his play Klop ("The Bedbug"). Music for the production was provided by
Dmitri Shastakovich and sets by Rodchenko. The play was actually a reworking of a
Mayakovsky screenplay, which had been rejected by the film studio Sovkino. It tells the
story of a NEP-era philistine who abandons his worker-girlfriend for the daughter of the
owner of a successful beauty parlor. As a result of a brawl at his wedding party, he
accidentally gets frozen. He is then revived fifty years later in 1979. The moderns at
first mistake him for an honest worker, but then correctly identify him as a bourgeoisus
vulgaris, a blood-sucking insect similar to, but more dangerous than, the bedbug. He is
put on display in a cage equipped with special filters to trap all the dirty words.
In Februrary of 1929, Mayakovsky was again in Europe--Berlin, Prague, and Paris. On
the trip he produced more anti-bourgeois poems, chosing as topics characters such as a
one-legged prostitute and the attendant in the men's room of a Paris restaurant.
Mayakovsky also visited a casino in Monte Carlo, which of course he denouced as a den
of international racketeers and a cesspool of repulsive vice. After the trip, Mayakovsky
penned one of his most popular poems Stikhi o Sovetskom Pasporte ("Poem of the
Soviet Passport"). In this work, he expresses glee at the squeamishness and discomfort
his Soviet passport caused various border officials, who thought the the passport was as

explosive as a bomb, as prickly as a hedgehog, and as dangerous as a razor.

Mayakovsky had abandoned Novy Lef in 1928, and in 1929 he tried to establish a new
organization, Ref ("Revolutionary Front"), intended as a workshop, a school for the
study of the technology of writing, that would cooperate with RAPP. But Ref never
really got off the ground, and in February 1930 Mayakovsky announced his intention of
applying for membership in RAPP. The literary establishment in RAPP was ready to
accept Mayakovsky, but not exactly with open arms. Aleksandr Fadeev noted:
Mayakovsky is suitable material for RAPP. As for his political views, he has
demonstrated his affinity with the proletariate. This does not mean, though, that
Mayakovsky is being admitted with all his theoretical background. He will be admitted
according to the extent in which he rids himself of that background. We shall help him
in this.
Mayakovsky's play Banya ("The Bathhouse")--a fierce attack on bureaucratic stupidity-had its premiere in Leningrad on 30 January 1930. It was a disaster. No laughs or no
applause after the first two acts. The play opened in Moscow in Meyerhold's theatre on
16 March 1930, where it did somewhat better; but still, critical and public reaction was,
in general, negative.
A better reception was given to a reprospective exhibition of Mayakovsky's work which
was presented in Moscow and then Leningrad in February and March 1930. Most of the
representatives of RAPP, however, did not attend. At the opening of the exhibition,
Mayakovsky read Vo Ves Golos ("At The Top of My Voice"), a type of summing up of
his career.
In his final days, Mayakovsky kept active as usual. He was busy preparing for the
opening of his next play, Moskva Gorit ("Moscow on Fire"). Containing stylized scenes
from the Revolution of 1905, it was Mayakovsky's most avant garde dramatic piece yet.
Plot and historical veracity are abandoned; clowns crack jokes; the Emperor, worried
about a pants shortage, changes his trousers every minute; a giant worker on stilts
dwarfs the factory owners; bombs and fireworks explode, and Western leaders are
lampooned.
On 4 April 1930, Mayakovsky bought a share in a housing cooperative. On 11 April, he
missed a public appearance at Moscow University, because of illness. 12 April and 13
April were business as usually. He had numerous appointments for personal
appearances on 14 April and 15 April. But, at 10:15 A.M. on 14 April 1930,
Mayakovsky shot and killed himself in his Moscow office. He left a suicide note, dated
12 April, which read in part:
As they say,
"the incident is closed."
The love boat
wrecked by daily life.
I'm all even with life
and nothing would be gained by listing
mutual hurts,
troubles,
and insults.

....
Don't think I'm a coward. Seriously, it could not be helped.
Mayakovsky's body lay in state for three days and was viewed by 150,000 mourners. He
was creamated on 17 April 1930.
Moscow on Fire premiered on 21 April 1930 as scheduled.
Principal Source:
"Vladimir Mayakovsky" by Victor Terras. Twayne Publishers. Boston. 1983.