Photographic Eye as Poetic I: Maiakovskii's and Rodchenko's Pro eto project (1923)

Abstract

Early in Dostoevskii's The Idiot, the hero is transfixed by a photoportrait of Nastasia Filippovna, whose face is to haunt him thereafter: ‘On the portrait a woman of truly unusual beauty was represented. She was photographed in a black silk dress … her eyes were dark and deepset, her brow pensive’.1 The face, as we later learn, bears the imprint of a knowledge too terrible to contemplate, knowledge of the tragic end to Nastasia's own life; and, in the context of the novel's eschatological thematics, of the end of time itself Fifty years later, on 5 June 1923, Maiakovskii published in book form the first edition of a poem Pro eto (About That), illustrated with photomontages produced by his agitprop collaborator, the constructivist artist, Aleksandr Rodchenko.2 The last of Rodchenko's photomontages (see figure 9) is juxtaposed with verses in which the poet imagines that in some future Utopia he has been resurrected from the dead to serve as keeper at a zoo — a favourite haunt of Lily Brik, the love of his life. The montage is dominated by a large photo of Lily who, likewise, looks back from the end at a captivated viewer in the ‘real’ time of the era in which the image was produced. It also contains an instantly recognizable photograph of the poet, looking in at a caged polar bear and up at the superimposed image of Lily. 3 Maiakovskii knew that his persona was a function of his being in the public eye, and of the unbreakable association between the camera image and its own reproducibility. By portraying Maiakovskii looking at Lily Brik, who looks into the camera (and out at us), Rodchenko achieves an identification of Maiakovskii the unique self, with us, the anonymous viewers of Maiakovskii the public persona.