KHLEBNIKOV, FILONOV, AND A PAINTING THAT REFUSES TO HANG ON THE WALL. MALEVICH’S SQUARE. FEBRUARY 1917. MEMORIES OF WAR. A STOMACH WOUND. A KISS FROM KORNILOV. RUSSIA AND ASIA. RUSSIA AND EUROPE. ESENIN IN VALENKI. MAYAKOVSKY HAS THE LAST WORD: THE PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO DRINK.
You were able to meet all the great writers of your time. You’ve talked about some already, later you’ll say more. But today, I’d like to shift our focus to the great artists. You’ve written about painting. Perhaps you could say something about a figure as unique and significant—yet at the same time unjustly forgotten or repressed—as Pavel Filonov.
Sure, I knew Filonov. But we weren’t close friends. We were very meticulous when it came to the demarcation of groups, you know. He was in a different circle than I was. His own, separate. Then there was Malevich and Tatlin’s, there was Chagall’s . . . For example, when Malevich was director of the Vitebsk Art Institute, he didn’t like Chagall very much. Among other things, they were divided on their ideas of figurality: Chagall was for the human figure, even if represented in the most fantastical ways, in flight, etc. Malevich, on the other hand, believed in geometric abstraction. I was closer to Malevich’s group. And Filonov had his own group, Khlebnikov’s. To him, Khlebnikov was a true authority. Filonov had a particular religious faith. He was a sectarian. He was a truly great painter, a good poet, and completely possessed. He drew strange, ghostly human figures, a little like the ones in religious icons; he drew them as if they weren’t from our own time, as if they came from the century that discovered poetry. Filonov had had an extremely hard life; his students helped him a great deal.
What do you mean by “possessed”?
Let me tell you a story. Once, at the Stray Dog, Khlebnikov read a poem with anti-Semitic content. Yes, that’s how he was, Khlebnikov, he was just made that way, there’s nothing to be shocked about, he could have even proposed out of the blue that they eat one of the members of the group. Mandelstam, who was in the audience, said he felt offended as a man and a Jew and challenged Khlebnikov to a duel. There were a lot of people there. Khlebnikov wouldn’t retract his poem and he asked me to be his second. Filonov was to be the other second. And so, Khlebnikov and I went over to Filonov’s. I don’t know if, from the protocol point of view, that was the right way to go about things . . . I’d been in a duel once, but unfortunately, all I managed to hit were the papers my opponent was carrying in his coat pocket. So, as I was saying, Khlebnikov and I went over to Filonov’s. At the time, he lived on Vasilyevsky Island. On Dunkin Lane. “Dunkin” from Dunya, a common, very popular name for women. That street was famous because that’s where the prostitutes lived. And in fact, at the entrance to the street there was a patrol (this was just before the war) that wouldn’t allow soldiers to pass. Anyway, we were able to get through. Khlebnikov told Filonov his story. Filonov—who no less than worshipped Khlebnikov—heard him out and then said, “Where did you get such a strange idea? It’s not up to the standards of our decade!” And Khlebnikov shot back: “In your opinion, what are the standards of our time?” Filonov replies: “Look, I did a painting and I want it to stay on the wall by itself, without nails.” Without skipping a beat or seeming surprised, Khlebnikov asks, intrigued: “And how did that go?” “For the time being, I’ve stopped eating.” “And the painting?” “It keeps falling down. I spend the day looking at it, staring at it, talking to it, I say: you stupid wall, what else do you want from me? You want Heaven to come and take me? Hold up the painting!” Then Khlebnikov asked him, again: “So what do you think about our squabble?” Filonov says, “I’m a calm, reasonable man. I think you’re both great poets. What you’re doing isn’t up to the standards of our time . . .”
In other words, Filonov believed in miracles?
He didn’t just believe in them, he expected a miracle every day. He was fascinated with primitive Christianity. He was convinced that, if someone truly believed, it was possible to walk on water. He expected the wall to be able to understand the greatness of his painting. Just as Tatlin wanted to fly. And, mind you, Filonov wasn’t just mad that the painting wouldn’t stay up without nails—he was astonished. But this whole school of avant-garde painters who saw Khlebnikov as an indisputable authority, every single one of them recognized the inevitability of miracles. What they were looking for was their pattern. They had little in common with this world, they didn’t need anything.
This asceticism is also noticeable in Khlebnikov’s “style.”
Oh, Khlebnikov . . . If men live in houses, he lived out the windows. If men live in the woods, he walked on branches. His nomadism is no legend. He could change his route, when traveling, to follow the one bird that hadn’t been scared off by him. I remember one time, on the way to Persia, Khlebnikov stayed with an old acquaintance of mine, whose surname I can’t remember now. He was a colonel, I remember, and in those parts there was still the old government. Khlebnikov stayed at his house. This guy, my acquaintance, at a certain point says to him, “I’m an old man, I’m forty-five years old, I really can’t understand what you’re doing.” And Khlebnikov, who was a man without a party: “You know, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is ten years older than you. And yet he understands. Why can’t you?” I’m telling you all this to give you an idea of the time. We were all in our twenties before the revolution, we thought that life needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. There were projects, plans. Often our ideas were juvenile. We were interested in the problematics of space and time: we understood that time can move forward as well as backward, and that space is the fourth dimension. Those artists, those painters, they were men that the revolution didn’t fully know how to read. Malevich’s Suprematist Square provoked indignant, violent reactions. Artists were taken aback. But even now that everything has become a little simpler, now that so much time has passed, if I saw a painting of that sort I would be astonished. And Malevich was perfectly convinced, in good faith, that his painting was a revolutionary flag. I’ve been told that Malevich took part in the 1905 Revolution. And he firmly believed that that was the revolution which understood. But the revolution that understands, that one is always in the future.
In 1905, you were clearly too young to understand what was going on. But what was your experience of the events of 1917 like?
I saw only the February Revolution firsthand. I’ll tell you my story, would you like me to? I was working in the army as an instructor at the drivers’ school. It was a three- or four-story building, in Petersburg, across from the Mont de Piété. A few days before the February events the authorities took the carburetors out of our armored cars, but we had some parts stored away. And almost everyone in the garage was a Bolshevik. Our school was a very good one. I knew cars, I even wrote a book on them. So, when the February Revolution broke out, my students told me that we needed to repair our armored cars. We went to a little garage, near the French Church, we fixed them and went out with two cars equipped with machine guns. The Volinsky Regiment was the first to rebel, the first day. The night before someone got killed and the next morning the regiment mutinied. I remember the first days of March. The soldiers before us were happy. We went around in our cars, the population disarmed the police without encountering any resistance. The various battalions, the infantry, the artillery, they mutinied. There was no real center to the rebellion. The factory workers acted immediately, perhaps even before the army. They closed the Winter Palace. They put Muslim soldiers on guard because they don’t drink alcohol. But no one attacked the Winter Palace: the tsar was in Gatchina. The mob took Rasputin’s body and set it on fire. The people hated him.
And your war stories? You were at the front, you were wounded . . .
You know, war is a strange thing. What I can tell you is that you don’t think about death.
What I actually remember feeling was great astonishment. Astonishment that everyone around you is falling and you’re still standing, you haven’t been hit . . . Yes, during the time we’re talking about now I had already been in war, on the western front, which is Polish territory today. Back on the front, after February, I found myself back alongside Stanislavov and I saw the traces of the war that had passed, not long before, through those places. I was young then. The government wanted to continue the war. There were terrible losses, a shortage of weapons, our artillery was good but we had bad positions. At a certain point, I remember, they decided to attack. It was raining. The soldiers didn’t know what to do. I encouraged them. And I was the first to go. I still remember that feeling today—of walking but not knowing why. And the unit followed me. I was almost over the German line and I threw two grenades, one to the right, one to the left. I was young, then. But the soldiers were right when they had yelled that they wouldn’t move. They weren’t the ones who had chosen that war. We were tired, poorly equipped. But that day, I went on the attack because in Petrograd I had said I would, and I felt responsible for my promise. My friends at the time, my literary companions, especially Mayakovsky, would never have done it. At some point I was shot. I fell. Later, at the field hospital, a young doctor, after looking at my wound, asked for my home address. I hadn’t realized it was so serious. Anyway, I survived. And while I was in the hospital, I remember, Kornilov visited (around that time there was Kornilov’s attempted coup, but his soldiers didn’t follow him). He gave me a medal and tried to kiss me, but I blocked him. What for? I said, I don’t like to kiss people, especially men, and even less so with a wound in my stomach. Babel laughed and laughed about this story with Kornilov. You see, Solzhenitsyn is a good writer, not always of course, and he’s a good journalist, but in mentality and politics he’s a Kornilovite. I returned to Petrograd. For a little while before leaving again for Persia. The people were for peace and against the Germans. Everyone was for land reform. The Bolshevik party was very strong, and the Socialist-Revolutionary party was huge. Volodya was a Bolshevik. Blok wrote that he voted for the SRs once during that period and that his doorman was very happy. The SRs were a revolutionary party and yet they were indecisive. They didn’t know what to do. But immediate action was needed.
Now that you mention Blok and the revolution—in one of his works, right after the revolution, the poem, “The Scythians,” Blok writes: “We are the Scythians! We are the slit-eyed Asians! Try to wage war with us—you’ll try no more!” In your opinion, what exactly was the ideology of “Scythianism” Blok and other Russian intellectuals were involved in during the years surrounding the revolution?
That poem of Blok’s is beautiful, but what it says is all wrong. First of all, the Scythians were an Iranian race. The discovery of the wheel, the anchor, and many other things have been attributed to them. It was a flourishing civilization, with ties to Greece, with a rich and unique culture. “Scythianism” is the Orient misinterpreted. Besides, even before Blok wrote that poem, even before Scythianism existed, this question, the fascination with the Orient, with primitive cultures, was in Dostoyevsky, in Tolstoy. Tolstoy and his love for the steppe. He lived in Bashkiria and he thought he was in the lands of the Iliad. Scythianism was a movement with an anti-European bent.
So in some ways it was a particularly difficult moment in the search for Russian cultural “identity,” the old question: Asian or European.
You see, this issue is very, very complex in our literature. Take Gogol, perhaps our greatest writer. Such a genuine Ukrainian (and one mustn’t forget the influence of the Ukrainian baroque, of Catholic culture on his art), such a devoted son of Russia. His relationship with the motherland is complex. He loves it and he mistreats it with love. He lives in Italy, he even knows which well in Rome has the best water. Remember how “Diary of a Madman” ends: “Take me! Give me a troika of steeds swift as the wind! Carry me out of this world! farther, farther […] a forest races by with dark trees and a crescent moon; blue mist spreads under my feet; a string twangs in the mist; on one side the sea, on the other Italy; and there I see some Russian huts.” So, on one side, Italy, and on the other, the Russian hut, and the madman who thinks he’s the King of Spain flies off in an out-of-control troika. The troika that later returns at the end of Dead Souls: “And you, Russia of mine, are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake?” And the whole world is watching this bird-troika. And Gogol proudly declares that it wasn’t built by the Germans. And this troika is contemporary with the railroads, the trains that he, Gogol, took all over Europe . . . You see, as our classics say, the Russian man, the young Russian, loves boundless freedom, for himself and for everyone else. And the steppe is freedom, open space, limitless. It is the motherland. And it’s also the beginning of the Russian epic. Chekhov began with the steppe too, and although he called Gogol “king of the steppe,” he thought that the Russian steppe still remained unsung. He was born in Taganrog, he came from the steppes. From the Kievan steppes. There weren’t any Scythians, there were Greeks, and there were nomadic populations, some completely uncivilized, others who had their own culture, who knew how to work the land. When Pushkin went to Odessa he found himself in ancient sites, depicted long before in the byliny. But if Pushkin wrote in the poem Poltava, “Quiet is the Ukrainian night . . .” Gogol, his great rival, writes in “A May Night”: “Do you know the Ukrainian night? Oh, you do not know the Ukrainian night!” Already, Gogol was dreaming of the great epic of the steppe. And Dead Souls was born, this story of small men, petty landowners, a petty fraud, all people who want to earn relatively small sums and commit small crimes to this end—and everything is interspersed with panoramas of vast Russia, of the as-yet-unsung Russia. And so this vast, grand Russia, epic Russia, as strange as it may seem, winds up in Blok, the lyrical Blok who describes his country thus: “And sticking in the slushy gutter / The motley spokes can hardly gain . . .” And how can we forget Khlebnikov, who returns to the steppe and references Sviatoslav, his enemies drinking out of his skull? You see, the steppe is . . . it’s Russia’s untapped potential. And, of course, Esenin plays a part in this complicated issue as well. The strange, unexpected Esenin.
You knew Esenin, no? When he was still in his “peasant” period, before the revolution.
Yes, and I’ve written about the spats incident. When Zinaida Gippius asked him: “It seems you are wearing new gaiters?” and he replied, “They’re valenki, madam.” And they really were valenki. It was cold out, there was a terrible cold. Moreover, here in Russia, gaiters have never been popular. This episode took place in a very elegant house, a salon, the Muruzi House. At that time, we had this expression: “Merezhkovsky is at Dom Muruzi and he’s looking for the divine spirit floor by floor . . .” Gippius . . . You know what Gippius means? It comes from the Greek hippos, horse. We called her hippo. She was a baroness, of German origin, Von Hippius, and there was a horse on their coat of arms. She was a very haughty woman. A good writer, with a tragic streak, like Vyacheslav Ivanov. But at the same time, an unrealized writer. Anyway, as far as haughtiness is concerned, the proudest Russian was without a doubt Mayakovsky. I remember him declaiming, “Wilson, I mean . . . Woodrow, you want a wheelbarrow of my blood?” Yes, Russia is a very strange country, where you can even ask the dead to rise. And it’s even possible that they would . . . What was I talking about?
Esenin. Esenin and Russia.
Esenin wrote: “The old maple on one leg / guards blue Russia.” It’s very poetic. Fable-esque. Esenin returned to myth through Afanasiev’s book which argues that folktales are based on myth, that folktales are stories about ancient gods . . . Then Esenin died . . . I remember—many years after Esenin’s death, there was the war, his sister had been sent away . . . And some carpenters rebuilt Esenin’s izba. Not for money. On their own initiative, as a gift. Then the noncommissioned officers were called back, and before leaving for the war many of them passed by and took a handful of earth from the yard of Esenin’s house. To take with them, in the war. You see, Esenin was a man of the people. He drank. But here the people drink. Mayakovsky wrote about that too:
So to say, if you had swapped bohemianism for class,
there’d have been no bust-up,
class’d have influenced
your thinking.
But does class quench its thirst with kvass?
Class, too, is no fool when it comes to drinking.