The Arts

Order No. 2 to the Army of Arts This is to you, well-fed baritones, from Adam to the present day shaking the dives called theatres with the groans of Romeo and Juliet or some such child’s play. To you, maitres painters fattening like ponies, guzzling and guffawing salt of the earth, secluded in your studios, forever spawning flowers and girlflesh for all you are worth. To you, fig-leaf-camouflaged mystics, foreheads dug over with furrows sublime, futuristic, imagistic, acmeistic, stuck tight in the cobwebs of rhyme. To you, who abandoned smooth haircuts for matted, slick shoes for bast clogs a-la-russki, proletcultists sewing your patches on the faded frock-coat of Alexander Pushkin. To you, dancing or playing the tune, now openly betraying, now sinning in secret, picturing the future as an opportune academic salary for every nitwit! I say to you, I, whether genius or not, working in ROSTA, abandoning trilles: quit your rot before you’re debunked with the butts of rilles! Quit it, forget and spit on rhymes, arias, roses, hearts and all other suchlike shit out of the arsenals of the arts. Whoever cares that “Ah, poor creature, how he loved, how his heart did bleed!” Master-craftsmen, not long-haired preachers, that is what we need. Hark! Locomotives groan, draughts through their floors and windows blow; “Give us coal from the Don, mechanics, fitters for the depot!” On every river, from source to mouth, with holes in their sides, river-boats too lie idle, dismally howling out: “Give us oil from Baku!” While we kill time, debating the innermost essence of life, “Give us new forms, we’re waiting!” everything seems to cry. We’re nobody’s fools till your lips come apart to stare, expectant, like cows chewing cud. Comrades, wake up, give us new art to haul the Republic out of the mud! Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, 1921 English translation by Dorian Rottenberg

River Delta, 2018. Photo © Jeffrey Conley.