Their fates would be tragic, depriving Russia of one of its greatest poetic generations. Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921 for alleged conspiratorial activities. Lyrical poet Sergei Esenin committed suicide in 1925. Mayakovsky killed himself in 1929. Mandel'shtam would be swallowed by the prison camps in the 1930s, and is believed to have died in 1938. Tsvetaeva eventually returned to an alien Soviet Russia in 1939 and would commit suicide in 1941. Pasternak, whose intense lyricism had little place in Soviet literature after 1934, found refuge in secondary work such as translations. Only after the Second World War did he begin work on his novel Doctor Zhivago, which eventually brought him the Nobel Prize. Akhmatova's personal, salon poetry proved the most capable of bearing witness to the times. Akhmatova suffered tragedy when ex-husband Gumilev was shot in 1921, and their son Lev was imprisoned twice in the 1930s. Her Requiem and Poem without a Hero (Poema bezgeroia), written in these years and not published till many years later, are in their gravity and control of language the most eloquent testaments to the years of purge and war.
Organisational questions loomed large for other art forms. Music and theatre involve complex issues of financing and distribution; cinema requires a vast investment in technology. Artists cannot work alone in these art forms, and during the revolution they needed to establish a positive relationship with the state to continue work. State-financed theatres found relations with the new rulers problematic from the start. The Bolsheviks and former imperial theatres both entered the relationship with the assumption that ballet, opera and other performing arts were inherently elitist. Opera and ballet, which required a sophisticated audience, years of intense training and the budget for several lavish productions a year, seemed unsustainable in a proletarian state. Only the foresight and tremendous patience of Lunacharskii saved the enterprises, and allowed for the eventual incorporation of the imperial arts into the Soviet pantheon. In the first years of Soviet rule, the imperial theatres seemed bent on defying Soviet power. Beginning with strikes in 1917, and then refusing to adjust the repertory to the tastes of the new audiences, the theatres could find no viable artistic path in Soviet society. Narkompros found itself responsible not only for former imperial theatres, but for theatres that had been privately run under the old regime, most prominently the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT).[20] The repertory of MKhAT changed little after 1917, featuring the same plays by Chekhov, Gorky, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which seemed somewhat irrelevant after 1917. Bewildered by the new realities of the theatre world, Stanislavsky took his troupe into a long period of touring abroad that ended only in 1922. Meanwhile, the banner of change in revolutionary Russia had to be carried by his former student, and later director of the imperial Alek- sandrinsky Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had the audacity to proclaim an 'October in the Theatre' in 1918.[21]
Independent of the avant-garde, and sometimes independent of the proletarian state, popular culture underwent fundamental change in the years of the New Economic Policy.[22] Members of the working classes who had seen military action or had served in emergency economic conditions during the war now had more leisure time to devote to culture, and possessed a small portion of disposable income. There was a vigorous working press in the capitals and provincial cities. Inexpensive editions of Russian classics were available, and competed for audiences with contemporary literary works. Trade unions, factories and military units gained cheap access to tickets for state-financed theatres, including the once-exclusive imperial theatres. Technologies such as the gramophone, cinema and radio brought culture to the darkest corners of the country.
Despite the wealth of native cultural sources for Soviet Russians, the decade saw a flood of foreign cultural imports, including the same American jazz and movies that were flooding Europe. Jazz music found native adherents such as Leonid Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman, whose bands remained popular for decades. Utesov went on to stardom in movie musicals. For all the success of imports, the borrowings were not suited to the ideological purposes of Soviet culture. In fact, jazz would come under heavy restrictions in the 1930s.[23] A more amenable tactic was to graft socialist content onto native cultural tradition. Examples could be found in music, where the so-called 'cruel romance' was recycled, as in Pavel German's 'Brick Factory' (1922), a story of working-class woe and redemption.[24] In literature, writers adapted popular genres such as the detective story, known as the 'Pinkerton tale' in Russian. Marietta Shaginian's Mess-Mend (Mess-Mend, ili Ianki v Petrograde) (1924) featured proletarian detectives who foil a plot by world capitalists to depose the Soviet government. Such work was often successful with audiences, yet critics from the proletarian Left claimed that any work adopted from capitalist cultures could never reflect proletarian consciousness.
No cultural form presented greater competition from the capitalist world, or more opportunity to create distinctly Soviet forms, than the cinema. The movie business requires tremendous investment and organisational support for training, production and distribution. The greater part of the movie industry fled Russia after the October Revolution, taking with it equipment, film stock and a generation of actors, scriptwriters and directors. Faced with rebuild- ingthe movie industry from scratch, and a recognition that cinema would allow the party to spread its message across the country, Lunacharskii established a film school in 1921 that, starting with almost nothing, would soon train a generation of masterful cinematographers and directors. Soviet cinema in the early 1920s faced overwhelming competition from Western imports, particularly American films. Stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were proving irresistible to Russian audiences. In response, the young Soviet film industry experimented with the action format. Lev Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land ofthe Bolsheviks (Neobychainyeprikliucheniia Mistera Vesta v strane bol'shevikov) (1924) told the story of an American visitor to Moscow swindled by a gang of thieves and rescued by honest Soviet police. The message of proletarian virtue and capitalist trickery was relieved by stunts and chases worthy of an American movie.[25]
Soviet film avoided the Hollywood star system by developing a corporate or collective production system. Film studios commissioned work from scriptwriters and directors, and supervised production to ensure ideological responsibility. Actors worked at the behest of the director, who became the focal point of the cinematic creative process. A generation of young directors came of age in the 1920s, producing films of aesthetic daring that they believed embodied the Soviet point of view. The Kinoglaz (Film-Eye) series of newsreel director Dziga Vertov coupled the non-fiction format with aggressive editing techniques to present viewers with a world of socialist values. Directors of the fictional or artistic film followed Kuleshov's lead, coupling action techniques with revolutionary values. Working on state commissions, Sergei Eisenstein created Strike (Stachka) (1924) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin) (1925), which attracted the attention of critics around the world. Dedicated to events from the tsarist past, the films used action techniques to create vivid images of class struggle. Expressive camera angles and visual metaphors, and editing techniques based on a grammar of conflicting images forced viewers to become active interpreters of events. The films of Vsevolod Pudovkin often concerned the same eras and events, and boasted the same power of persuasion. His Mother (Mat') (1926) and The End of St Petersburg (Konets Sankt- Peterburga) (1927) offered scenes of great violence and revolutionary passion. Pudovkin's editing aimed not at disquieting audiences, as Eisenstein's did, but at providing viewers with a coherent vision of the past.
21
Edward Braun,
22
James von Geldern and Richard Stites (eds.),
23
S. Frederick Starr,
24
Robert A. Rothstein, 'The Quiet Rehabilitation ofthe Brick Factory: Early Soviet Popular Music and its Critics',
25
Jay Leyda,