Futurist trail in poetry along with Vladimir Mayakovsky, his close friend and (from 1906) a fellow Muscovite. They were searching for a new poetic language and they heard it in the discord of the Moscow streets:
A juggler
pulls rails
from the mouth of a tram,
hidden by clock-faces of a tower.
We are conquered!
Bathtubs.
Showers.
An elevator.
The bodice of a soul is unfastened.
Hands burn the body.
Scream, or don't scream:
'I didn't mean…' -
torments
burn
sharp.
The prickly wind
tears out
a shred of smoky wool
* The poet's father, Leonid Pasternak, was a fashionable painter in Moscow and his
mother, Rozalia Kaufman, a well-known pianist. Scriabin was a close friend of the
family. Under his impact the teenage Boris studied music composition for six years. 'I loved music more than anything else, and I loved Scriabin more than anyone else in the world of music. Scriabin was my god and idol' (F. Bowers,
1969), vol. 1, p. 321).
from a chimney.
A bald-head streetlamp
seductively
peels off
a black stocking
from the street.127
Malevich called Maytovsky's 'From Street into Street' (1913) the finest illustration of 'versified Cubism'.128
Marina Tsvetaeva was equally a poet of Moscow. Her father was Ivan Tsvetaev, sometime professor of Art History at Moscow University and the founding director of the Pushkin Gallery, so, like Pasternak, she grew up in the middle of the Moscow intelligentsia. The spirit of the city breathed in every line of her poetry. She herself once wrote that her early verse was meant to 'elevate the name of Moscow to the level of the name of Akhmatova… I wanted to present in myself Moscow… not with the goal of conquering Petersburg but of giving Moscow to Petersburg':
Cupolas blaze in my singing city,
And a wandering blind man praises the Holy Saviour,
And I present to you my city of church bells
– Akhmatova! - and also my heart.129
Through their friendship in these years, Tsvetaeva gave Moscow to fellow poet Mandelstam as well. 'It was a magic gift', wrote the poet's wife Nadezhda, 'because with only Petersburg, without Moscow, it would have been impossible to breathe freely, to acquire the true feeling for Russia.'130
After 1917 Moscow superseded Petersburg. It became the Soviet capital, the cultural centre of the state, a city of modernity and a model of the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted to build. Moscow was the workshop of the avant-garde, the left-wing artists of the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) and Constructivists like Malevich and Tatlin, Rodchenko and Stepanova, who sought to construct the new Soviet man and society through art. It was a city of unprecedented freedom and experimentation in life as in art, and the avant-garde
believed, if only for a few years in the 1920s, that they saw their ideal city taking shape in it. Tatlin's 'tower' - his unrealized design for a monument to the Third International on Red Square - expressed these revolutionary hopes. A giant striding figure to be made out of steel and iron girders, tiered and rounded like the churches of medieval Muscovy, his would-be creation symbolized the city's messianic role, in the words of the refrain of the Internationale, to 'make the world anew'. From the old idea of Moscow as the Third Rome to the Soviet one of it as leader of the Third International, it was but a short step in the city's mission to save humanity.
Soviet Moscow was supremely confident, its confidence reflected in the huge building projects of the 1930s, the mass manufacture of motor cars, the first metros, and the forward-upward images of Socialist Realist 'art'. Moscow's old wooden houses were bulldozed. Churches were destroyed. A vast new parade route was constructed through the centre of the city: the old Tver Boulevard was broadened out (and renamed Gorky Street), a Revolution Square was laid out on the site of the old market, and Red Square was cleared of its market stalls. In this way the Lenin Mausoleum, the sacred altar of the Revolution, became the destination of the mass parades on May Day and Revolution Day. With their armed march past the Kremlin, the citadel of Holy Russia, these parades were imitations of the old religious processions they had replaced. There were even plans to blow up St Basil's cathedral so that the marchers could file past the Revolution's leaders, standing in salute on the Mausoleum's roof, and march off in one unbroken line.
Stalin's Moscow was thus recast as an imperial city - a Soviet Petersburg - and, like that unreal city, it became a subject of apocalyp-tic myths. In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel
a suppressed manuscript about Pontius Pilate and the trial of Christ. As their horses leaped into the air and galloped upwards to the sky, Margarita 'turned round in flight and saw that not only the many-coloured towers but the whole city had long vanished from sight, swallowed by the earth, leaving only mist and smoke where it had been'.131
And yet throughout the twentieth century Moscow was still 'home'. It was still the mother city it had always been, and, when Hitler attacked it in the autumn of 1941, its people fought to defend it. There was no question of abandoning the city, as Kutuzov had abandoned it to Napoleon in 1812. A quarter of a million Muscovites dug last- ditch defences, carted food to the soldiers at the front and cared for the injured in their homes. With one last desperate effort the Germans were pushed back from the city's gates - a spot still marked today by a giant iron cross on the road from Moscow to the Sheremetevo airport. It was not the Soviet capital but Mother Moscow which was saved. In the words of Pasternak:
A haze of legend will be cast Over all, like scroll and spiral Bedecking gilded boyar chambers And the Cathedral of St Basil.
By midnight denizens and dreamers Moscow most of all is cherished. Here is their home, the fount of all With which this century will flourish.132
4
overleaf:
