Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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MAJAKOVSKIJ AND EISENSTEIN CELEBRATE THE
TENTH ANNIVERSARY
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154 Slavic and East European Journal
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Majakovskij and Eisenstein 155
The initial sketch for Eisenstein's film was close to the final version of
Majakovskij's poem. Working from a scenario of over a hundred pages for
a vast "film epic" by A. Efimov, Eisenstein wrote his own scenario in Oc-
tober 1926. The first three parts coincide roughly with the final film.
Parts four through seven continue the historical review through the Brest-
Litovsk Peace, the building of the Red Cavalry, the years of intervention,
typhus, and other hardships, the Perekop victory, and a culminating appeal
to begin Socialist Construction.6 Essentially this is the outline of It's Good!,
but as Majakovskij worked on the poem, what was originally a
documentary acquired lyric dimensions as well. Unlike his previous long
poem Vladimir Il'iE Lenin with its three long narrative sections broken only
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156 Slavic and East European Journal
by flashes of satire and repeated oaths to the proletariat and the Communist
Party, It's Good! takes the form of nineteen short episodes or "poem
details" - a form Majakovskij first explored in his scenario How Are You?7
Each episode of It's Good! could stand alone as a separate poem. Ma-
jakovskij, however, combined and arranged them with particular care for
their cumulative emotional impact.
After announcing the purpose of this poem in the first episode, the
poem chronicles the historical events of 1917 in a series of six anecdotes,
alternating satire and heroic pathos. The poet appears in the last of these
scenes which recounts his late night encounter with Alexander Blok in the
midst of the revolution, and then records the sounds of the revolutionary
streets and countryside. Episodes eight and nine introduce themes of
Socialist patriotism and bourgeois incomprehension. The central section of
the poem, the tenth episode, presents Soviet Russia surrounded by White
armies and foreign interventionists. Life within the circle, Majakovskij's
own experiences, and events from the Civil War occupy the next five
episodes which contrast lyric and documentary sequences. Then the circle is
broken; the sixteenth episode narrates the end of the war. The final sections
look forward in time to what the country will become and backward to the
revolution's honored dead. Elegy gives way to ode as the poem concludes on
a Whitmanesque note: Majakovskij affirming his sense of sharing in all that
his country is and will be.
Because of the pressures of a tight shooting schedule - a mere eight
months from March 1927, when the anniversary committee approved the
final scenario, until November - Eisenstein was forced to reduce his initial
plan and limit the film to October in Petrograd. Even thus shortened,
Eisenstein was not able to complete the film in time for the anniversary and
only a few fragments were screened at the celebration in the Bolshoi Theater
on 6 November. There are reports that the film came under political
scrutiny and that shots of Trockij had to be cut. However, very little is
known about what went on between November 1927 and the final release of
the film in March 1928, when Eisenstein wrote: "October is ready. It is ready
and not ready. A year of completely overwhelming work. By the end this
year wore us out."8 With much fanfare a few years ago Grigorij
Aleksandrov, Eisenstein's collaborator, released a full version of the film -
but all he added were a few shots.
As released in 1928, October chronicles the revolution from the
toppling of the Tsar in February 1917 through Lenin mounting the podiu
to address the Congress of Soviets in October. It is the public spectacle
the revolution: revolutionary troops marching; the rituals of diplomacy; t
trenches of the war; bread lines; the anti-Provisional Government
demonstrations of July; the clash of Kerenskij and Kornilov; and the fin
military victory of the Petrograd workers under the leadership of the
Bolsheviks.
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Majakovskij and Eisenstein 157
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158 Slavic and East European Journal
The passage realizes the metaphoric cliche "bloody day." Then the
blood itself comes alive: it drips ("kaplami / kapala"), the sounds evoking
the name of Lenin's would-be assassin, Kaplan, whose name in turn
suggests the form of the revolution's enemies, "fourlegged . . . jackals,"
("cetverolapye ... .akalii"). The sound-play carries through the Bolsheviks'
response. The Cheka terror raises the "paw of class" ("lapa
klassa") against the "white-fanged monster." This is one of the few
instances in the poem of the sort of personified hyperbole that predominates
in the class warfare of 150,000,000 and Vladimir Il'ib Lenin. Instead of
metaphors and imaginative fictions, It's Good! "drinks from the river named
'Fact,' " to quote the poem's prologue (235).
The central event of the poem, of course, is the October Revolution and
its most dramatic moment - the storming of the Winter Palace.
Majakovskij's interpretation of this event is markedly different from that in
Vladimir Il'ib Lenin. In commemorating the leader's death, despite all his ef-
forts to avoid doing so Majakovskij made Lenin into the epitome of the
historical process, the one ruling intelligence commanding the actions of the
working masses. It's Good! redresses this imbalance. The first harbinger of
October sounds in the angry voices of peasant and worker soldiers who are
fed up with the Provisional Government and give their backing to the
Bolsheviks. Section two quotes their long lists of empty promises. The
alternation of long lines and very short ones heightens their militant irony:
They lied:
"the people -
freedom,
forward,
epoch,
dawns.. ."
for nought.
Where
is the land,
and where
the law,
to give
us land
by spring? -
Nothing!
What
do they give
for February,
for work, for not going
AWOL? -
Fuck all. (238.)
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Majakovskij and Eisenstein 159
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160 Slavic and East European Journal
Like It's Good!, October shows Lenin in Smolnyj, the Winter Palace
with the ranks of its defenders thinning as the siege closes more tightly
around it and the ministers sitting amidst its ornaments. The cannon shots
from the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, the Cruiser Aurora hovering on the river,
the huge mass of people charging across Palace Square and into the Palace,
the contrast between their simplicity and its grandeur, the revolutionary
soldiers putting an end to looting, and Antonov announcing
that the Provisional Government is deposed - all of these moments are
common to film and poem. Juxtaposing the two, however, reveals how
much more rhythmically compelling Majakovskij's poem is than
Eisenstein's film. With a few well-chosen words, Majakovskij suggests a vast
array of elements from the most varied categories. He is more laconic than
Eisenstein by the means of silent film. The poet has greater success in har-
nessing the historical artifacts to the formal demands of his medium. The
elaborate mechanics of the storming on which Eisenstein lavishes much
precious footage remarkably are not memorable. Soldiers march, hands
grab guns, trucks roll through the night, speakers mount and leave the
podium at endless meetings. Eisenstein is too slavishly devoted to the
meticulous details of these preparations. The rhythm sags. The Palace with
its incredible wealth of bric-a-brac proves to be stronger visually than its
mass of invaders.
Only towards the very end of this sequence is Eisenstein able to
generate rhythmic momentum. He does an extraordinary trick with film
time using the clock which ticks off the minutes till the deadline of the
Bolshevik ultimatum. The clock first shows 11:30, then 11:40, 11:50, 11:55,
11:58, and 12:00. In actual time the first interval lasts three minutes, the
second - five, the third - two, the fourth, three minutes on the film clock,
stretches out to four minutes, and the final two minutes last another three.
Real time compresses and expands according to the needs of the film.
This motif of clocks is more fully developed in the scenario than in the
final film (77-86). As in Trockij's History of the Russian Revolution,
Eisenstein's scenario plays on the wonderful irony that the iron precision of
the Military Revolutionary Committee caused the insurrection to come
twenty-four hours late, on the morning of 25 October instead of 24 October
as planned. I would suggest that it was this, and not shots of Trockij, that
led to the re-editing of the film.
It is important to keep in mind that October marked a turning point in
Eisenstein's approach to film art. Its best passages - the raising of the
bridges, the sequence of the gods, the dancing - were experimental.
Eisenstein was seeking a new level of expressiveness in film which would
allow him to convey intellectual messages in highly emotional images. He
dreamed of filming Marx's Das Kapital using devices from James Joyce's
stream-of-consciousness technique." It's Good!, by contrast, was the last
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Majakovskij and Eisenstein 161
epic poem Majakovskij was to write, the culmination of ten years of poetic
practice is responding to the latest events in the history of his country and its
revolution.
In conclusion, it is necessary to contrast the underlying political
message embodied in the structures of these two works, so close in other
respects. Both stormings end in Smolnyj with the Bolshevik-dominated
Congress of Soviets. Eisenstein's climax shows Lenin mounting the podium
accompanied by the cheers of the Congress. Majakovskij, in harmony with
the poem's emphasis on the common soldiers, concludes with the entire
Congress triumphantly singing "The International."
Framing the events of the storming, Majakovskij evokes the cold wind
of October, an oblique reference to a line from Blok's poem about the
revolution, The Twelve - "Wind, wind, over all God's earth."'2 In
Majakovskij's poem the wind and the trams that never stop running lend an
everyday note to the historic events of the night. In contrast to his usual
hyperbole, Majakovskij effectively understates the significance of the great
upheaval. In the opening lines the winds blow "under Capitalism": they
continue, "as always," in the concluding lines, only "under Socialism" (254,
263). The balance in the poem between the everyday and the heroic speaks
powerfully to its audience of the significance of every single member in the
struggle to build the commune - a vision of revolution far more faithful to
the mass ethos of the 1920 Storming of the Winter Palace than Eisenstein's
more orthodox conclusion.
NOTES
1 See the Lef program in the form of three manifestoes in LEF: Zurnal levo
iskusstv, 1 (March 1923), 3-11. Two of the manifestoes are available with other th
articles in English translation: Screen, 12 (1971-72), 25-58.
2 For descriptions of the pageant by two members of the committee which directed
Petrov, "Massovye revoljucionnye prazdnestva," Teatr, 1957, No. 8, 89-96 a
Deriavin, "Vzjatie Zimnego dvorca v 1920 g.," in Sovetskij teatr: dokumenty i m
(L.: Iskusstvo, 1968), 274-75.
3 Majakovskij called for "the revolution of the spirit" in his "Open Letter to the
Gazeta Futuristov, No. 1 (15 March 1918).
4 The distinction between a factual order and a "social command" was crucial for Ma-
jakovskij. He fulfilled orders because he wanted to, sensing without being told what the
"proletarian state" needed.
5 Vladimir Majakovskij, "Xorolo!" Polnoe sobranie socinenij (13 vols.; M.: GIXL 1958),
VIII, 236. I have revised the English version of It's Good! by Herbert Marshall in
Mayakovsky (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 364-72. Marshall translated only the first
and last sections of the poem, which has never been translated in its entirety.
6 These events occur in another version in "Acts" (5-9). See Sergej Ejzenitejn, Izbrannye
proizvedenija (6 vols.; M.: Iskusstvo, 1971), 67-86, 425-45.
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162 Slavic and East European Journal
7 See my translation of "How Are You?" in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 7, Fall
1973, 161-76. See also my analysis of the work in the same issue, "Shackled by Film: The
Cinema in the Career of Vladimir Majakovskij" 297-320.
8 Sergej Ejzenitejn, "Nag Oktjabr '," Kino, 13 March 1928. The process of making the film
is described by Ju. Krakovskij, "Kak sozdavalsja fil'm Oktjabr '," in Iz istorii kino (M.:
Iskusstvo, 1965), VI, 40-64.
9 Hollis Frampton, "Stan and Jane Brakhage Talking," Artforum, 11 (1973), 72-73.
10 Sergej Ejzengtejn, "Montai 1938," Izbrannye stat'i (M.: Iskusstvo, 1956), 281.
11 Sergei Eisenstein, "Notes for a Film of Capital," tr. Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and
Annette Michelson, October, 2 (1976), 3-26.
12 Aleksandr Blok, "The Twelve," Sobranie socinenij (6 vols.; M.: Pravda, 1971) III, 233.
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