No icon better expresses the essence of that age (Kultura 1 [or the Heroic Age of the Russian Revolution], in Vladimir Paperny's terminology ) than El Lissitzky's Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. The "three-edged frankness of the bayonet" and the "sharp-angled face" of Feliks Dzerzhinsky were aimed at the "crusty gut of the earth's routine" and indeed everything dull, round, or predictably rectangular. According to one of the prophets of the revolutionary avant-garde, Vassily Kandinsky, the triangle was more "sharp-witted" than the square and less philistine than the circle. It was also much more Mercurian than Apollonian, and therefore-stylistically-much more Jewish than Russian. Jewishness was not the only way of representing the triangle' but it was one of the more familiar and aesthetically convincing. Levinson's "red wedge of a beard," Mindlov's angular movements, Rozov's knifelike figure were all references to the traditional and pervasive iconography of Mercurianism. According to one of Ilya Ehrenburg's characters (a Chekist), Lenin might be a sphere; Bukharin was a straight line; but Trotsky, "the chess player and the chief of the steppe hordes, disciplined and lined up under the banner of the twenty-one theses of some resolution-that one is a triangle." And according to Arosev's Terenty the Forgotten, "if I were a futurist artist, I would represent Trotsky as two downward -pointing triangles: a small triangle-the face-on top of a large triangle-the body."153
One obvious reading of the wedge-over-circle imagery is violence ("beat the whites"); the other is sex (love). Eduard Bagritsky portrayed both. His poem "February," written in 1933-34 and published posthumously, is about "a little Hebrew boy" who loves books about birds (the same birds, presumably, that adorned Galina Apollonovna's robe and inhabited Efim Nikitich Smolich's realm of "nature"):
Birds that appeared like weird letters,
Sabers and trumpets, spheres and diamonds.
The Archer must have been detained
Above the darkness of our dwelling,
Above the proverbial Jewish odor
Of goosefat, above the continuous droning
Of tedious prayers, above the beards
In family albums ...
As a young man, he falls in love with a girl with golden hair, a green dress, and "a nightingale quiver" in her eyes, "all of her as if flung wide open to the coolness of the sea, the sun, and the birds." Every day, as she walks home from school, he follows her "like a murderer, stumbling over benches and bumping into people and trees," thinking of her "as a fabulous bird who had fluttered off the pages of a picture book" and wondering how he, "born of a Hebrew and circumcised on the seventh [sic] day," has become a bird catcher. Finally, he gathers up his courage and runs toward her.
All those books I'd read in the evenings
Hungry and sick, my shirt unbuttoned
About birds from exotic places,
About people from distant planets,
About worlds where rich men play tennis,
Drink lemonade, and kiss languid women,
All those things were moving before me,
Wearing a dress and swinging a satchel. ..
He runs beside her "like a beggar, bowing deferentially" and "mumbling some nonsense." She stops and tells him to leave her alone, pointing toward the intersection. And there,
Fat-bellied and greasy with perspiration,
Stands the policeman,
Squeezed into high boots,
Pumped up with vodka and stuffed full of bacon ....
Then comes the February Revolution, and he becomes a deputy commissar, a catcher of horse thieves and burglars, "an angel of death with a flashlight and a revolver, surrounded by four sailors from a battleship."
My Hebrew pride sang out as clearly,
As a tight string stretched out to its limit.
I would have given much for my forefather
In his long caftan, his hat with a fox tail
From under which, like a silvery spiral,
His earlock crawled out, and a thick cloud of dandruff
Floated over the square of his beard,
For him to be able to spot his descendant
In this strapping fellow who loomed like a tower
Over the bristling guns and the headJights,
Over the truck.that had shattered midnight ....
One night, he is sent to arrest some gangsters, and there, in a suffocating brothel reeking of face powder, semen, and sweet liqueur, he finds her-"the one who had tormented me with her nightingale gaze." She is bare-shouldered and bare-legged, half asleep and smoking a cigarette. He asks her if she recognizes him, and offers her money.
Without opening her mouth, she whispered softly, "
Please have some pity! I don't need the money!"
Throwing her the money,
I barged into-
Without pulling off my high boots, or my holster,
Without taking off my regulation trench coat
The abysmal softness of the blanket
Under which so many men had sighed,
Flung about, and throbbed, into the darkness
Of the swirling stream of fuzzy visions,
Sudden screams and unencumbered movements,
Blackness, and ferocious, blinding light ...
I am taking you because so timid
Have I always been, and to take vengeance
For the shame of my exiled forefathers
And the twitter of an unknown fledgling!
I am taking you to wreak my vengeance
On the world I could not get away from!
Welcome me into your barren vastness,
In which grass cannot take root and sprout,
And perhaps my night seed may succeed in
Fertilizing your forbidding desert.
There'll be rainfalls, southern winds will bluster,
Swans will make their calls of tender passion.154"
According to Stanislav Kuniaev, this is the rape of Russia celebrated by "the poet of the openly Romantic ideal Zionism who does not distinguish between messianic ideas and pragmatic cruelty." [my emphasis] According to Maxim D. Shrayer, this is "a dream of creating harmony between the Russian and Jewish currents in Jewish history, ... a dream, if you wish, of a harmonious synthesis, which would lead to the blurring of all boundaries, i.e., to the formation of a Russian-Jewish identity .... Sexual intercourse with his former Russian beloved is the modicum of the protagonist's revenge upon and liberation from the prerevolutionary world of legal Jewish inequality and popular anti-Semitic prejudice." And according to the protagonist himself, this is 'his revenge on the world he "could not get away from"-the world of "goosefat," "tedious prayers," and "cloud[s] of dandruff." The Jewish Revolution within the Russian Revolution was waged against "the shame of exiled forefathers" and for the "Hebrew pride" singing like a string; against the Russia of fat cheeks and for the Russia of Galina Apollonovna. It was a violent attempt to conceive a world of Mercuri an Apollonians, a Russia that would encompass the world.155
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