This famous Russian poet toured America to explain capitalism to the Soviets in the Roaring ‘20s
Vladimir Mayakovsky couldn’t help but love New York City, though
“The way by which you got your millions is of no concern in America,” wrote the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky during a trip to New York City in 1925. “Everything is ‘business;’ and business matters are everything that makes a dollar.”
Exactly a century after Alexis de Tocqueville’s foundational study, Democracy in America, Mayakovsky’s dispatches from the exotic United States were published piecemeal in the Russian papers, and while they may have complicated the usual Bolshevik clichés about American plenty, they also, on the whole, confirmed them. Mayakovsky, a Georgian-born Muscovite, was by 1925 already one of the USSR’s best-known poets. Severe, brooding, and handsome, he had been imprisoned for his political beliefs before the Revolution, but afterward became one of the nation’s cultural heroes as a leading member of the Russian Avant-Garde, author of Futurist manifestos, and founding member of the Left Front of Art.
Mayakovsky may have set off on his American journey to quiet a rival, Sergei Esenin, who’d recently published a poem about his own travels to the U.S. Mayakovksy had mentioned America in some of his early work, and Esenin was challenging his knowledge of the place. So Mayakovsky, with characteristic bluster, set off to prove him wrong.
To the Americas, Mayakovksy came by sea, “crawling for eighteen days, like a fly over a mirror.” He was, from the very outset, attuned to the valences of class, approaching the division of seafaring humans with sharpness and wit. Even, or perhaps especially, on the ship, “the classes fall out quite naturally,” he writes. “The first class puke wherever they like. The second — down over the third class; and the third — over themselves.” The lower decks were “a mere hold freight,” he wrote, carrying “economic migrants from the Odessas of the whole world — boxers, snoops, Negroes.” Later, he describes the throngs of New Yorkers on the streets moving as though in shifts — before dawn, it’s the black working class; closer to 7 a.m., it becomes an “uninterrupted flow of whites.” Once the “working masses melt away” around 8 a.m., there appears another, “cleaner and better-groomed” populace, “with an overwhelming smack of bobbed, bare-kneed, lean girls with sinuous stockings — the workforce of the clerical offices, the businesses and the shops.” For all the throngs of humanity he describes, Mayakovsky seems to see it all through the lens of mechanization, well-timed waves of purposeful energies ebbing and flowing as the day wears on.
Mayakovsky’s trip actually began in Cuba and Mexico. The famous painter Diego Rivera met him at the station, and took him on a tour of Mexico City before serving him a meal. “We ate purely Mexican things,” wrote Mayakovsky. He wasn’t terribly impressed by the food, “dry, really tasteless, heavy flatcakes, or pancakes. Mince meat rolled up in a mass of flour and a whole conflagration of pepper.” A discussion of the state of poetry in Mexico also frustrated him; he lamented that the writers would never see themselves as professionals if the broader culture didn’t support their work.
After his Mexican jaunt, Mayakovsky continued on into the States, showing the reader America just before the Great Depression, a country full of promise but also locked in fierce moral debate about wealth, alcohol, race, and much more.
Once across the border in Texas, the poet was greeted warmly by his erstwhile countrymen. “The only Russian for three years!” exclaimed the owner of a shoe shop, who was but one of the delighted Russian-Americans to greet Mayakovsky and show him around. Of his early days in America, he wrote, “All around there are well-kept roads crawling with Fords, and various structures of the technological fantasy-land.”
But nothing prepared him for New York City, where he claimed he couldn’t see the tops of buildings no matter how he craned his neck. His impressionistic observations of the city were energetic and colorful, and obviously informed by the Futurists’ lust for speed and industry. Of the Manhattan morning, he wrote, “Around the small cafés, single men start getting their body machinery into gear, cramming the first fuel of the day into their mouths — a hurried cup of rotten coffee and a baked bagel, which right here, in samples running to hundreds, the bagel-making machine is slinging into a cauldron of boiling and spitting fat.”
Of the many things that seemed to overwhelm him, one was particularly dazzling: electricity, which literally illuminated the hitherto shadowy corners of everyday life. Lenin himself thought the success of the Soviet dream hinged on bringing electricity to the masses. He famously said, “Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country,” and created the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia in 1920. Five years later, Mayakovsky incredulously observed the “stream of humanity” wearing raincoats, describing how “their resinated yellow waterproofs sizzle and glitter like innumerable samovars in the electric light.”
For Mayakovsky, the realities of the American city were nearly all class-dependent, though in Chicago he at least noted a more visible working class, if also a more “provisional” feeling to the city’s buildings, even skyscrapers.
Food became one obvious place to parse class differences. “Everyone’s lunch is dependent on the weekly wage,” he wrote of New York, delineating those who bought a snack in a paper sack from those who fed a machine a few nickels for a sandwich, from the wealthy, who dined at restaurants representing a range of international cuisines, “anywhere except tasteless American ones which guarantee you gastritis with Armour tinned meat that’s been lying around almost since the War of Independence.” He experienced hilarious horror at the depravity of Coney Island’s freak shows, the low-class entertainments that “stimulate such ecstasy.”
But Mayakovsky also, perhaps against his better judgment, found himself here and there smitten with America. “I love New York on busy autumn days, in the working week,” he wrote, sounding like any good contemporary rom-com heroine.
For the Soviet reader, who would very likely never travel to American shores, Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America lent variation and color to the coalescing portrait of the enemy. In the near century since its publication, scholars have noted a number of errors in the text, but in some respects, the message was more important than the details. Mayakovsky was writing for a reading public that knew little about American urban life. For them, he shared details of American food, work, and leisure, and affirmed that in the land of the free “any form of profiteering is encouraged.”
