pressure gauge or a speedometer'.71 This was the Soviet paradise Zamyatin satirized in his novel We, which depicts a futuristic world of rationality and high technology, with robot-like beings who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are controlled in every way by the One State and its Big Brother-like ruler, the Benefactor. Zamyatin's novel was the inspiration of George Orwell's 1984.72
Thanks to the influence of Meyerhold, two great artists were brought into the orbit of the cinema. One was Dmitry Shostakovich, who worked at Meyerhold's theatre from 1928 to 1929, during which time, influenced no doubt by its production of The Government Inspector, he composed his Gogolian opera The Nose (1930). In his student
days, between 1924 and 1926, Shostakovich had worked as a piano accompanist for silent movies at the Bright Reel cinema on Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad.73 It set the pattern for his life - composing for the cinema to earn some extra money and keep himself out of trouble (in total he would score the music for over thirty films).74
Writing for the screen had a major influence on Shostakovich's composing style, as it did on the whole Soviet music school.75 The big film sound of the Soviet orchestra and the need for tuneful melodies to appeal to the masses are obvious enough. No composer in the twentieth century wrote more symphonies than Shostakovich; none wrote better tunes than Prokofiev - in both cases certainly an effect of writing for the cinema. Films using montage, in particular, demanded new techniques of musical composition to reflect their polyphonic dramaturgy. They required a new rhythmic treatment and faster harmonic shifts to deal with their constant cross- cutting between the frames,* the sharp joins between the scenes, and to highlight the associations between themes and visual images. These cinematic qualities are discernible in many of Shostakovich's works - notably the music for The Nose and his Third ('May Day') Symphony (1930), with its fast-paced montage of musical tableaux. Shostakovich once explained that in writing his film music he did not follow the standard Western principle of illustration or accompaniment, but sought rather to connect a series of sequences with one musical idea - so that in this sense it was the music which revealed the 'essence and the idea of the film'.76 The music was to be an added element of the montage. This ideal was best expressed in Shostakovich's first film score, for The New Babylon (1929), a cinematic reconstruction of the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune in 1871. As its director Kozintsev explained, the purpose of the music was not just to reflect or illustrate the action but to take an active part in it by communicating to the audience the film's underlying emotions.77
Meyerhold's other new recruit to the cinema was the poet Maya-kovsky, who wrote some thirteen film scenarios and (a man of
* Soviet films that used montage had a far higher number of different shots (in October, for example, there were 3,200 shots) compared to the average (around 600) in conventional Hollywood films during the 1920s.
extraordinary looks) starred in several films as well. Meyerhold and Mayakovsky had been close friends since before the war. They shared the same far-left outlook on politics and theatre which found expression in their partnership on Mystery Bouffe. Mayakovsky played the part of the 'Person of the Future' - a proletarian deus ex machina who appeared on stage hanging from the ceiling - in the first (1918) production of his play. It was, he said, referring to himself and Meyerhold, 'our revolution in poetry and theatre. The mystery is the greatness of the action - the bouffe the laughter in it.'78 Mayakovsky spread his talents wide: to his poetry and his work in theatre and the cinema, he added journalism, writing radio songs and satires, drawing cartoons with brief captions for the lubok-like propaganda posters of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and creating advertising jingles for state stores and slogans for the banners which appeared on every street. His poetry was immersed in politics, even his intimate love lyrics to his mistress Lily Brik, and a good deal of his best-known verse, like the allegory 150,000,000 (1921), a Soviet parody of the bylina, which tells the story of the battle between Ivan, the leader of the 150 million Russian workers, and the Western capitalist villain Woodrow Wilson, was agitational. Mayakovsky's terse, iconoclastic style was tailor-made for political effect in a country such as Russia where the lubok and chastushka (a simple, often bawdy, rhyming song) had real roots in the mass consciousness, and he imitated both these literary forms.
Forward, my country,
move on faster! Get on with it,
sweep away the antiquated junk! Stronger, my commune,
strike at the enemy, Make it die out,
that monster, the old way of life.79
Mayakovsky embraced revolution as a quickening of time. He longed to sweep away the clutter of the past, the 'petty-bourgeois' domesticity of the 'old way of life' (byt), and to replace it with a higher
and more spiritual existence (bytie).* The battle against byt was at the heart of the Russian revolutionary urge to establish a more communistic way of life.80 Mayakovsky hated byt. He hated all routine. He hated all the banal objects in the 'cosy home': the samovar, the rubber plant, the portrait of Marx in its little frame, the cat lying on old copies of Izvestiia, the ornamental china on the mantelpiece, the singing canaries.
From the wall Marx watches and watches
And suddenly
Opening his mouth wide,
He starts howling:
The Revolution is tangled up in philistine threads
More terrible than Wrangelf is philistine byt
Better
To tear off the canaries' heads -
So communism
Won't be struck down by canaries.81
In much of his writing Mayakovsky talked of his desire to escape this humdrum world of material things ('it will turn us all into philis-tines') and to fly away, like a figure from Chagall, to a higher spiritual realm. This is the theme of his long poem Pro eto (About This) (1923), written in the form of a love song to Lily Brik, with whom he was living, on and off, in Petersburg and Moscow in a menage a trois with her husband, the left-wing poet and critic Osip Brik. In his autobiography Mayakovsky records that he wrote the poem 'about our way of life in general but based on personal material'. He said it was a poem 'about byt, and by this I mean a way of life which has not changed at all and which is our greatest enemy'.82Pro eto chronicles Mayakovsky's response to a two- month separation imposed by Lily Brik in December 1922. In it, the hero, a poet living all alone in his
* The word byt ('way of life') derived from the verb byvat', meaning to happen or take plat e. But from the nineteenth century, bytie took on the positive idea of 'meaningful existence' which became central to the Russian intellectual tradition, while byt became increasingly associated with the negative aspects of the 'old' way of life. + Leader of the White armies in southern Russia during the civil war.
29. Alexander Rodchenko: illustration from Mayakovsky's Pro eto (1923)
tiny room while his lover Lily carries on with her busy social and domestic life, dreams about a poem he wrote before 1917 in which a Christ-like figure, a purer version of his later self, prepares for the coming revolution. The despairing hero threatens to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Neva river: his love for Lily compli-
cates his own crisis of identity, because in his imagination she is tied to the 'petty-bourgeois' byt of Russia in the NEP, which has diverted him from the ascetic path of the true revolutionary. This betrayal leads to a dramatic staging of the narrator's crucifixion, which then gives way to the redemptive vision of a
