Uhhh...I Don't Get It.

I’ve spent the past few months in Moscow exploring areas of culture, history, and literature. It’s been educational, enlightening, and well, fun. This weekend I experienced something that I liked very much, but that was so beyond my poor ability to understand, that it knocked all my intellectual pretensions out of me.

I trundled off to the the Mayakovsky museum, an exhibit about the revolutionary poet and writer. It has a reputation for being inspired by the author’s own works – that is, as a futurist. In the words of the website:

“This new Museum creates a model of age and world of Mayakovsky, transforms the poetical metaphor into poetical compositions, realizes intellect and fantasy of the author, transforms a visitor from an obedient super into a co-author and participant.”

Hmmmm.

The building has been scooped out below Mayakovsky’s original 4th floor apartment. One starts near the top (a la Guggenheim) and winds down through the vast open space. The impression is almost of a warehouse, with large artistic installations of sculpture. Attached to all these things, in little frames, or under glass panels, or hanging in the background, are the articles and documents that made up this extraordinary writer’s life and times.

It was fascinating. It is, by far, the most modern and radical museum I’ve been in - a true tour de force of artistic interpretation, impression, and expression. Each sight line provided another glimpse of other levels, each a striking new area to explore.

Except that I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was all about. Unlike a traditional museum, there was no written placard explaining certain areas. One had to somehow glean this from the original material. The Russian, for me, was impenetrable.

A group of military officer cadets was getting a guided tour, so I tried to tag along and eavesdrop. The director of the museum was explaining what one installation symbolized (sort of a dining table lined with personages being consumed by a huge machine topped with a picture of Stalin) but I decided to break off on my own when the description dragged on and the cadets started looking over their shoulders at me. I don’t think they were grasping it, either.

Mayakovsky, of course, was one in a long line of Russian poets who went well before his time. In this case, suicide at age 38 over disappointment at the early development of the Soviet State he supported so strongly. Fittingly, all the photos in the museum are of a dour, frowning, gloomy man with a furrowed, heavy brow.

Perhaps I’ve been to too many other museums that show you someone’s desk and chair and a few yellow copies of early work – but the Mayakovsky museum will probably always stick in my mind as a unique and original place.

It’s just that now, days later, I still can’t really figure out what it was all about.

I tried to assuage my intellectual shortfall with dinner at a Georgian restaurant, and ended up getting seated next to a birthday party. 8 men in suits. They began requesting a song from the singer, and he dutifully sang all about the FSB and Lyubyanka (the post-Soviet KGB and its headquarters building). The birthday party rose and sang along with it; did a shot of vodka, and demanded that the singer do the song one more time. He happily did, and the birthday boy came to my table and encouraged me to stand and sing with him.

I didn’t really know the words except for the chorus – pretty easy to pick up the second time around – and by this point in the evening the birthday boy didn’t seem too sure of the lyrics either. He gave me a big hug in response to my best wishes.  

It’s probably best to humor the federal agents on their birthdays.