For writers the years after 1905 were equally frenetic with change. The most important of the new prose writers, Andrey Belyi, published his phantasmagoria of St. Petersburg in the revolution, the novel Petersburg, in 1913. Belyi was emblematic of the period in other ways, as he was an adept of the “anthroposophy” of Rudolf Steiner, at whose center in Switzerland he spent much of his time. The poets were even more active and contentious, with new groups, each with a manifesto, forming every year. The Acmeists in St. Petersburg met in the Stray Dog café and proclaimed Apollonian clarity against the “Dionysian” symbolists. Mostly very young, their most striking work came long afterward, as in the case of their greatest writer, the poet Anna Akhmatova. The futurists appeared a bit later with their manifesto, appropriately titled “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” The futurists were as apocalyptic as the Symbolist generation in their evaluation of the world, but saw the approaching upheavals in a more positive light. They were fascinated with technology and saw the end of the older forms of art as liberating. The principal writer of the futurists was the poet Vladimir Mayakovskii, who was not only an artistic revolutionary but also a revolutionary in real life. Earlier on he had worked in the Bolshevik party and later he was to become the most famous poetic spokesman for the Reds after 1917.
Mayakovskii’s attraction to Marxism was as unusual among the writers and artists as it was among the intelligentsia as a whole. The intelligentsia, however, outside the artistic avant-guard in Petersburg and Moscow, remained committed to the older ideals of the nineteenth century, liberalism in politics, occasional populist socialism, and its artistic canons as well. They preferred Turgenev to Merezhkovskii or Belyi, and only some of the poets managed to break out of the rarified atmosphere of the St. Petersburg cafés to reach the provincial reader. When the war came, most of the writers followed the general reaction of the country and the intelligentsia and supported the war effort. The revolution was another matter. By 1917 most realized that the war effort had largely failed, and they were happy with the fall of the tsar but were not heavily engaged in politics or at first even distracted by it. While Mayakovskii enthusiastically worked for the Bolsheviks, the composer Prokofiev was more typicaclass="underline" 1917 was one of his most productive years as he composed major works having nothing to do with the cataclysm around him. Most of the artists and writers, like the rest of the intelligentsia, greeted the Bolshevik revolution with hostility, but it was the outbreak of the Civil War and the economic collapse of Petrograd that forced them to make decisions.
To the writers and artists, whatever their reaction to the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution was not so much the seizure of power by Lenin and his comrades as a fundamental and total upheaval, a descent into chaos and anarchy. It seemed to them that Russia had returned to the Time of Troubles, that all the veneer of civilization that the country had acquired since Peter the Great had been blown apart by a massive upsurge of popular anger and violence. For many it was the reign of Antichrist.
A small number of the writers, however, were sympathetic to the revolution, if not to the specific Bolshevik platform. Alexander Blok’s most famous poem, “The Twelve” (1918), depicts the anarchy and violence of Petrograd in the dark of the winter, but the twelve working-class Red Guards marching through the half-deserted streets are following a leader who is Jesus Christ. In contrast Vladimir Mayakovskii was entirely in the Bolshevik camp, and spent the years of the Civil War writing not only poetry but also agitational verse and drawing pictures for political posters. He changed his elegant futurist suits for a proletarian look in dress and a shaved head. In his poetry he tried to make the masses the heroes, most famously in “150,000,000” that began
150,000,000 is the name of the creator of this poem.
Its rhythms – bullets,
Its rhymes – fires from building to building.
150,000,000 speak with my lips…[trans. E. J. Brown]
Some of the painters and artists worked for the Reds as well, making huge modernist decorations for the May Day parades and other Bolshevik rituals. Most writers and artists, however, waited on the sidelines or hoped for White victory. Many moved south to the White-occupied territories. As the Reds drove the White armies out of the country, large parts of the intelligentsia followed them, producing a Russian culture in exile in Berlin and Paris.
For the musicians, dancers, and some of the painters, the move to Western Europe or America was the start of another career. Rakhmaninov made so much money from concerts that he was able to support other Russian émigrés, contributing to Igor Sikorsky’s aircraft company in Connecticut. Prokofiev, the great singer Fyodor Shaliapin, and the dancers of the Ballet Russes worked throughout the world. Though the Ballets Russes fell apart after Diagilev’s death in 1929, it left a legacy to the world of ballet in its many active dancers and in the work of George Balanchine in America. For the writers, however, the emigration was largely a disaster. Dependent on a Russian audience, they were cut off from Russia where their works could not be published and ceased to circulate legally after the early twenties. Russian émigrés did set up publishing companies, journals, and newspapers in Paris and elsewhere, but their readership was necessarily small, limited to the Russian and Russian-speaking exile communities in the West. Nevertheless, some were able to create remarkable works, especially in the early years. The poet Marina Tsetaeva wrote through the revolution, and when she came to Paris in 1921 continued to publish her verse in large quantity until about 1925. Even the older writers were able to produce a great deal at first, but the lack of audience soon began to tell. Western publishers were not interested in translations of any other than a select few, and even Ivan Bunin’s 1933 Nobel Prize could not awaken much interest in the latest émigré literature.
In the emigration new intellectual currents arose, like Eurasianism, the idea that Russia was not really European, but part of a separate “Eurasian” civilization exemplified by the Mongol Empire. Other small groups elaborated new philosophies of religion, or drifted toward fascism. Some made their peace with the Soviets and returned home, such as the writer (Count) Alexei Tolstoy, a distant relative of Lev Tolstoy. Prokofiev returned in 1935. Maxim Gorky, who had maintained his distance from both the Soviets and emigration after 1920, returned in 1932 to become a major figure in the Soviet literary world. Others were not so lucky: Tsvetaeva, after returning, committed suicide in 1941.
CULTURE AND NEP
In the years of NEP the fate of the émigré writers and artists abroad seemed to be increasingly irrelevant, as the cultural world of the new USSR burgeoned with new artistic trends and new names. In the early years the Bolsheviks had no definite position on the arts. During the Civil War some of the radicals in the party formed the Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organizations, known as Proletkult, which combined schools to teach workers to write poetry and paint with radical esthetic notions. Lenin and Trotsky were skeptical of Proletkult, believing its claims to represent the correct proletarian line in art to be spurious. The Bolshevik leadership was also generally skeptical of much modernist art: Lenin reproached the Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii for printing so many copies of the works of Mayakovskii. Whatever their content, the verses failed to impress Lenin with their quality and he thought the money better spent elsewhere.