On the Futurists’ last day in Odessa, Maria told Mayakovsky to wait for her in his hotel room at 4:00 p.m. Two days later, on the train between Nikolaev and Kishinev, Mayakovsky began to recite:107
You think it’s delirium? Malaria?
It happened.
Happened in Odessa,
“I’ll see you at four,” said Maria.
Eight,
Nine,
Ten.
Past midnight, and many anguished stanzas later, she finally came.
You entered,
brusque, matter-of-fact,
torturing the suede of your gloves,
and said:
“Guess what,
I’m getting married.”
Fine.
Go ahead.
I’ll be all right.
Can’t you see I’m perfectly calm?
Like the pulse of a corpse.
Remember?
You used to say:
“Jack London,
money,
love,
passion,”
but all I could see
was you—La Gioconda
whom someone was bound to steal.
And did.
His revenge would be terrible. “Remember! Pompeii perished when they mocked Vesuvius.” But of course Pompeii was doomed in any case. Like Sverdlov and Osinsky, Mayakovsky had known all along that there would be earthquakes and famines, and that brother would betray brother to death, and children would rebel against their parents and have them put to death, and the sun would be darkened, and the moon would not give its light, and the stars would fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies would be shaken. Like Sverdlov and Osinsky, Mayakovsky connected a doomed love to a doomed world. Impossible loves were but reminders of impossible lives. The days of distress were but signs of the prophet’s election and the world’s violent end.
I,
mocked and cast aside,
like an endless
dirty joke,
can see through the mountains of time
him
whom no one else can see.
There,
beyond the scope of feeble vision,
at the head of the hungry hordes,
in its thorny crown of revolutions,
strides the year
1916.
I am his John the Baptist;
I am where the pain is—
everywhere;
in each drop of the tear stream
I nailed myself to the cross.
It’s too late for forgiveness,
I’ve burned the souls that nurtured compassion.
And that is much harder than taking
a hundred million Bastilles!
And when,
with rebellion
his advent heralding,
you step forth to greet your savior,
I’ll rip out
my soul,
stomp on it,
make it big,
and hand it to you—
all bloodied, for a banner.
But no, it is he, the “spat-upon Calvarian,” who is the Savior. His Maria is Mary, the Mother of God, and he is, “maybe, the most beautiful of her sons.”
In Heaven, he asks God his Father to build a merry-go-round on the tree of knowledge of good and evil and offers to bring in the best-looking Eves from the city’s back alleys.108
Not interested?
Shaking your shaggy head?
Giving me the big frown?
You don’t really think
that creep with the wings
standing behind you
knows the meaning of love?
. . . . . . . . . . .
You, the almighty,
came up with a pair of hands,
made sure everyone got a head,
so why couldn’t you come up with a way
for us to kiss and kiss and kiss
without this torture?
I thought you were really powerful, a god almighty
but you’re just a drop-out, a puny little godlet.
Look, I’m bending down
to pull out a cobbler’s knife
from inside my boot.
Winged scoundrels!
Cringe in your paradise
Ruffle your feathers as you tremble in fright!
And you, the one with the incense breath,
I’ll split you open from here to Alaska!
Heaven would be exposed for the joke it is, but—as in the original Revelation—the last and decisive slaughter would take place on earth. The hungry would crawl out of the swamp, and the well-fed—Voronsky’s “driveling, hiccuping, lip-smacking” meat-market butchers—would hang in place of the bloody carcasses. The theft of La Gioconda would be avenged.
Come on, you
meek, sweaty little starvelings
festering in your flea-ridden muck!
Let’s turn Mondays and Tuesdays
into holidays
by dipping them in blood!
Let the Earth, at knifepoint, think again
about whom it has chosen to pick on!
The Earth,
grown fat,
like Rothschild’s lover,
used up and left to rot.
Let the flags flap in the heat of the gunfire
The way they do on any decent holiday—
And you, lampposts, hoist up
the shopkeepers’
bloody carcasses.
I outswore,
outbegged,
outstabbed myself,
sank my teeth into someone’s flesh.
The sunset, red as the Marseillaise,
Shuddered as it breathed its last.109
3
THE FAITH
The most obvious question about Sverdlov’s, Osinsky’s and Mayakovsky’s luminous faith is whether it is a religion. The most sensible answer is that it does not matter.
There are two principal approaches to defining religion: the substantive (what religion is) and the functional (what religion does). According to Steve Bruce’s deliberately conventional version of the former, religion “consists of beliefs, actions, and institutions which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of action, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose. Such a formulation seems to encompass what ordinary people mean when they talk about religion.” The question, then, is whether the Marxist drama of universal degradation and salvation (preordained, independent of human will, and incapable of falsifiable verification) is an impersonal process possessed of moral purpose and whether communism as the end of recognizable human existence (all conflicts resolved, all needs satisfied, all of history’s work done) is in some sense “supernatural.” The usual answer is no: because the Marxist prediction is meant to be rational and this-worldly; because the “supernatural” is usually defined in opposition to reason; because “ordinary people” don’t think of Marxism as a religion; and because the whole point of using the conventional definition is to exclude Marxism and other beliefs that assume the nonexistence of supernatural (science-defying) entities.1
The problem with this formulation is that it also excludes a lot of beliefs that ordinary people and professional scholars routinely describe as “religions.” As Durkheim argues in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, most human beings for most of human history had no basis for distinguishing between the “natural” and the “supernatural”; no way of questioning the legitimacy of their ancestors’ ways; and no objection to sharing the same world with a variety of gods, spirits, and more or less dead forebears, not all of them human. Such beliefs may seem absurd in a world with a different sense of the “ordinary,” but they are not about the supernatural as opposed to something else. In Christian and post-Christian societies, they have been seen to comprise “pagan religions,” “primitive religions,” “traditional religions,” “primary religions,” or simply a lot of foolishness. According to the definitions centered on the supernatural, such beliefs are either uniformly religious or not religious at all.2
One solution is to follow Auguste Comte and Karl Marx in associating religion with beliefs and practices that are absurd from the point of view of modern science. What matters is not what “they” believe, but what we believe they believe. If they believe in things we (as rational observers) know to be absurd, then they believe in the supernatural, whether they know it or not. The problem with this solution is that it offends against civility and possibly against the law without answering the question of whether communism belongs in the same category. If “animism” is a religion whether it realizes it or not, then Marx’s claim that the coming of communism is a matter of scientific prediction (and not a supernatural prophecy) is irrelevant to whether rational observers judge it to be so. The problem with rational observers is that they seem unable to make up their minds and, according to their many detractors, may not be fully rational (or they would not be using non sequiturs such as “secular religion” and would not keep forgetting that “religion” as they define it is the bastard child of Christian Reformation and European Enlightenment). Some newly discovered “world religions” are named after their prophetic founders (Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity); others, after the people whose beliefs they described (Hinduism, the Chukchi religion); and yet others, by using vernacular terms such as Islam (“submission”), Sikh (“disciple”), Jain (“conqueror”), or Tao (“path”). Most of the rest are usually grouped by region. Some regions (including China for much of its history and large sections of Europe in the “secular age”) may or may not have religion, depending on what the compilers mean by the “supernatural.”3