Zonov held a place either executive or artistic at the Meyerhold Theater, which I visited frequently, for there was a congenial gang there. He often invited me to a private little feast in his den, where he served sweet Caucasian wine and caviar and sometimes champagne. Always with him was a little actress whom he fancied, but who did not seem to love him too much. Zonov looked like a tired professor, and he was always bewailing the absence of Yessenin. He exhibited a snapshot of Yessenin that he carried in his pocket book, and I was startled by its resemblance to the strange dancer I had known in New York. Zonov said unlovely things of Isadora Duncan, because she had married Yessenin and taken him from his friends. He said that Yessenin had proclaimed to them all that he did not love Isadora. But he had married her to get out of Russia, to see Europe and America. I said I did not consider love as always necessary, and that sometimes it might be expedient for a woman to save a man from his male friends. Zonov translated what I said to the actress and she screamed with laughter.
Meyerhold's was the revolutionary constructivist theater, which did the most daring things in dramatic production. There were no curtains. The audience saw clear through to backstage and watched the actors waiting to take their parts and come up to and retire from the front of the stage. The plan was novel. Meyerhold himself was a fanatic crusader in his ardor to make a great revolutionary theater express the revolutionary social system. All the symbols of the machine system were assembled on the stage: dynamos, cranes, scaffolding and turbines, until it resembled a regular workshop. Meyerhold said to me: "We need now great revolutionary plays and playwrights to make my theater the unique dramatic expression of the revolution." I had to talk to Meyerhold through an interpreter, but he impressed me as being more romantic than practical with his idea of making the stage the unique expression of the factory. I felt that after all the worker's life is not limited to the factory and should never be.
I was interested in the Moscow workers' attitude to the Meyerhold Theater. Whole blocks of seats were given to the factories and the barracks, but the theater, which was not very large, was never full. Yet the plays which Meyerhold put on were technically highly interesting. Vastly exciting to me was the presentation of The Inspector General, by Gogol. And unforgettable was one realistic scene of another play, in which the Czar was sitting on his chamber pot, with the imperial crown painted big upon it. But the workers and soldiers really preferred the ballet of the Bolshoi theater, the Moscow art theaters, the expressionist theater and the ordinary vulgar theaters. Whenever the workers received free tickets for the above-named theaters they never missed; workers and soldiers always filled them. But the audience of the Meyerhold Theater was of the intelligentsia—students and professional people. While the workers and soldiers showed a distinct preference for the straight familiar entertainment, it was the intelligentsia that was avid of revolutionary drama. The situation made me think of a Frenchman's saying that most of the work of the experimental artists was not intended to enlighten the working class, but to "épater la bourgeoisie."
I was invited to dinner by Lunarcharsky, the Commissar of Education and of Arts. He was one of the most flamboyant orators of the Soviet Union and also a talented playwright. I told him a little of the little I knew about education in general in America and Negro education in particular, and I seized the opportunity to mention the Russian theater and the theater of Meyerhold. I remarked that it was interesting that the workers and soldiers seemed to prefer the old ballet to the new experimental theater. Lunarcharsky said that in the early days of the revolution some had desired to suppress the ballet, but he had held out against it. He considered the ballet a great form of art and what he did was to give the workers and peasants and soldiers the chance to enjoy it, which they hadn't had under the old régime. He had conserved and subsidized the best of the classical theaters for the entertainment of the people. But also he had granted subsidies to the experimental theaters to give them their chance to experiment in creating their best. Lunarcharsky was a wise mediator. It is related that when the Moscow masses, excited to high resentment against the Russian Orthodox Church, attempted to destroy the wonderful Cathedral of Vasilly Blazhenny, they were stopped by the intervention of Lunarcharsky. There was not a day of my stay in Moscow that my eyes failed to be glad in contemplation of Ivan the Terrible's super-byzantine burnt offering to humanity. And Lunarcharsky in Moscow appeared like a guardian angel to me because he had made it possible for my eyes to see that glory.
Social Interest
My constant companion and interpreter was Venko, a big, strong, gloriously boisterous and comparatively young Russian. He had lived for years in an English Midland town and had left an English wife and children there to come to Russia after the revolution. The only sentimental thing in his mind was his family in England. Sometimes he was perplexed thinking about them. He said he was sure they wouldn't like living in Russia and he had no desire to return to England. He was not sentimental about his substitute Russian wife. He said she had married him only to get good food and a good apartment to live in. He was of peasant origin and she seemed to be from the poor professional class. Their living room constantly reminded me of that of the poor officer in The Brothers Karamozov. It was like a seamstress's place, with a sewing machine installed and scraps of cloth lying carelessly about, from which one's clothes picked up bits of thread, and it had a peculiar odor like that of clothes being washed with brown soap. But she was a good wife. Sometimes I stayed at Venko's house, after we had finished at a meeting and resorted to a café to drink vodka. And however late we got there, his wife would get up to serve food.
Venko was an interpreter in the O.G.P.U. He was not connected with the intelligence work. He didn't like office work. He preferred to agitate crowds. He was a marvelously gesticulating, noisy and frothy agitator, but there was not much substance in his phrases. And if you don't give Russians some meat to chew on when you talk to them, they soon tire of you, however brilliant your fireworks may be. If you have something to say they will listen for long hours upon hours, as patient as sheep, even if you are speaking in a strange language. And afterward they will ruminate on it with satisfaction through more long hours of interpreting. Venko was a good enough interpreter. My stay in Moscow was a vacation for him, of which we made a picnic. He was unorthodox about life, whether it was old or new, even as I, and he made the most unguarded and biting criticisms of things and personalities in his profane and boisterous Russian way.