CHANGED TIMES

On 14 April 1930, less than a month after the premiere of The Bathhouse, Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself. He wrote in the note he left when he died, ‘As they say, the case is closed.’ Symbolically, Mayakovsky's death marked the end of Russian Futurist theatre. As he added, his ‘love-boat’ had crashed on ‘byt’, the everyday, the humdrum.

Mayakovsky and his fellow Futurists had been swept up in the force of the revolutionary flood. They had believed in the revolution's power to construct the new human being, a task which allied them firmly with the revolutionaries. But as the day-to-day compromises, unpleasant initiatives and inevitable realpolitik of the post-1917 world began to bite, they were cut adrift. The disillusion was utterly catastrophic.

The signs of changed times had been visible at least since 1927. In January of that year Trotsky had been exiled to Alma-Ata. In the following months Eisenstein wrote that ‘the enormous breath of 1917 … is blowing itself out’, and the LEF group urged a united federation of writers, including all groups. The year 1928 saw the end of NEP and the inauguration of the first Five Year Plan. It was also the year of the first show trials when fifty-three engineers from Shakhty in the north Caucasus region were accused of sabotage and collaboration with Russians in exile: five were sentenced to death and forty-four were sent to prison. In 1929 Trotsky was deported into exile, there were purges of cultural institutions, and a vicious campaign was launched against the writers Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin. Anatoly Lunacharsky was forced to resign as Minister for Education and the Arts.

By 1930 Mayakovsky, who the year before had tried to transmute LEF and Novyi LEF into REF (the Revolutionary Front of the Arts), had even applied to join RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), the group most vociferously opposed to LEF. And a week after his suicide, his last dramatic work, Moscow Is Burning, was staged at the First Moscow State Circus. The old love of the theatricalised circus had not quite died with him.