The Theater of Meyerhold was poor, always struggling financially, yet Mayakovsky suddenly wrote on the cover of his play: "A Comedy in Six Acts," though it could just as easily have been in four. He did it to increase his royalties. I think that's ugly; after all, they were friends.
Meyerhold complained to me, "How can you explain to an author that he should cut down those acts?"
I can readily say that Mayakovsky epitomized all the traits of character I detest: phoniness, love of self-advertisement, lust for the good life, and most important, contempt for the weak and servility before the strong. Power was the great moral law for Mayakovsky. He had mastered a line from one of Ivan Krylov's fables: "For the strong, it's always the weak who are wrong." Except that Krylov said it in condemnation, mockingly, but Mayakovsky took the truism seriously and acted accordingly.
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It was Mayakovsky who first said that he wanted Comrade Stalin to give speeches on poetry at Party Congresses. Mayakovsky was a lead singer of the cult of personality, and Stalin didn't forget it, he rewarded Mayakovsky with the title "the best, the most talented." Mayakovsky compared himself with Pushkin, as you know, and even now many seriously rank him with Pushkin. I think that our comrades are mistaken. I'm not talking about talent now, talent is a moot point, I'm talking about position. In a cruel age Pushkin praised liberty in his writings and called for mercy for the fallen. Mayakovsky called for something completely different, he called on youth to model its life on Comrade Dzerzhinsky.* That would be like Pushkin asking his contemporaries to imitate Benkendorf or Dubelt. t After all, you don't have to be a poet, but you do have to be a citizen. Well, Mayakovsky was not a citizen, he was a lackey, who served Stalin faithfully. He added his babble to the magnification of the immortal image of the leader and teacher. Of course, Mayakovsky wasn't alone in this unbecoming behavior, he was one of a glorjous cohort.
There were many Russian creative artists who were infatuated by the person of our leader and teacher and who rushed to create works of praise for him. Besides Mayakovsky, I could mention Eisenstein and his Ivan the Terrible, with music by Prokofiev.
For some reason I am included in this list-Mayakovsky, Eisenstein-as the representative from the composers' brotherhood. But I don't include myself in it and therefore I will decline the honor with great vehemence. Let them find another candidate. I don't care whom they pick-Prokofiev, Davidenko, the "Red Beethoven," or Khrennikov. Let them figure out which among them wrote the most joyous song about "our great friend and leader," as the line we sing goes.
Many, many men were drawn to the great gardener and master of the sciences. There are toadying stories about Stalin's special magic power, which manifested itself in personal contact. I heard a few of these stories myself. They're shameful, and the most shameful part is that people told them about themselves. One such story was told to me by a film director, I won't give his name. He's not a bad person and he's given me work many a time. Here's the story. Stalin loved the
•fcJix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1 877-1926), creator of the Soviet secret police.
tAiexander Khristoforovich Benkendorf (1788-1844) and Leonti Vasilyevich Dubelt (1792-1862) were the highest-ranking police officers under Nicholas I.
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movies and he saw The Great Waltz, about Johann Strauss, many times, dozens of times. (I might add that this fact has not altered my love of Strauss.) The waltz doesn't resemble the leighinka greatly, and the director didn't have to fear Stalin's wrath. Stalin also liked Tarzan films, he saw all the episodes. He naturally saw all the Soviet films as well.
It didn't take long for Stalin to see every Soviet film made, because in the last years of his life there were very few pictures produced, just a few every year. Stalin had the following aesthetic theory. Of all the pictures produced, only a small fraction was any good, and even fewer were masterpieces, because only a few people were capable of making masterpieces. Stalin determined who could create a masterpiece and who couldn't, and then he decided that bad films weren't needed, nor were the good ones. He needed only masterpieces. If the production of cars and airplanes could be planned, then why not plan the production of masterpieces? It's no more complicated, particularly if you're dealing with film, since film is also an industry.
A poet can write poetry for himself, he doesn't even have to write it down, he can keep it in his head. A poet doesn't need very much money to write poetry. We've now found out that they wrote poetry in the camps. It's hard to keep an eye on poetry. And you can't keep watch over composers either, particularly if they don't write ballets or operas.
You can write a little quartet and then play it at home with friends.
It's a bit more difficult with music, of course, it's harder to keep out of range of the watchful eye. You need music paper and even special score paper for symphonies, and as you know, there's a shortage of score paper, which is sold only to members of the Composers' Union.
But you can still make your own homemade variety and write your symphonies without the permission of the overseeing offices, getting around the regulations.
But what can a film maker do? It's a strange profession, something like being a conductor. The first impression one has is that the director-like the conductor-merely gets in the way of other people trying to do their work. The second impression is the same.
A lot of people are needed to make a movie, and a lot of money. Stalin could be in charge one hundred percent. If he ordered a film made, they'd make it. If he ordered them to stop shooting, they stopped 249
shooting. That happened many times. If Stalin ordered a finished film destroyed, they'd destroy it. That happened more than once too. Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow was destroyed on Stalin's command, and I for one am not unduly saddened by that because I can't understand how you can create a work of art from the plot of a boy denouncing his father. The film naturally glorified that marvelous child.
And so the great leader and teacher decided to organize the planned production of film masterpieces. He followed Ilf and Petrov's recipe.
In one of their short stories they have a man walk into a publisher's office and inquire if they publish a certain percentage of dull, poorly selling books. They tell him that of course they do, and the man suggests that they commission him to produce that percentage of bad books.
Stalin's formula was that since only a few masterpieces came out each year, then only a few films should be made each, year, and every one would be a masterpiece, especially if they were entrusted to the directors who had already, in Stalin's opinion, created masterpieces.
Simple and brilliant. And so that's what they did. I remember that at Mosfilm, the country's major studio, they were shooting only three films, Admiral Ushakov, The Composer Glinka, and Unforgettable 19 19. The directors were appointed because Stalin knew for sure that they would make masterpieces, naturally with his help and his personal direction. They were Mikhail Romm, Grigori Alexandrov, and Mikhail Edisherovich Chiaureli, one of the greatest scoundrels and bastards known to me. He was a great fan of my music, of which he understood absolutely nothing. Chiaureli couldn't tell a bassoon from a clarinet or a piano from a toilet bowl.