Two weeks before his infamous suicide Vladimir Maiakovskii bumped into Dziga Vertov in Leningrad, and they agreed to have a “feature-length conversation about their creative work” (using film terminology). Vertov waited for the promised meeting in his hotel room all evening, but Maiakovskii never showed (Pronin, 5). Aleksandr Pronin aims to fill the tragic void of their non-meeting, showing that they admired each other's work, influenced each other: “reflected each other” (5).
The first section of Pronin's book is about Maiakovskii and film, as a viewer, an actor in films, and—most importantly—a screenwriter. It is well-known that Maiakovskii liked going to the movies, and everyone knows about the films he wrote and starred in, in 1918; but the more than sixteen screenplays he wrote are less familiar. Besides the three he acted in four of his screenplays, Na front (1920), an agitfilm for the civil war; Evreiskoe schast΄e: Evrei na zemle (1926), about the successful resettlement of the Crimea by Jews; Troe (1927), about children from capitalist countries at the soviet summer camp Artek; and Oktiabriukhov i Dekabriukhov (1928), about two brothers living in capitalist and soviet societies were produced (43–51). This leaves around ten screenplays that were never produced. Maiakovskii turned two of them into his last two plays, The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1930).
We read about all these screenplays in Pronin's book. Often he reconstructs lost screenplays, so we get a very broad picture of the intensity of Maiakovskii's work as a screenwriter. It also shows us how Pronin turns his readers into co-investigators, taking them through the various steps needed to find something and sometimes admitting that the search must stop: there is nowhere left to go, which will surely inspire future researchers. This is a book that asks questions. Most are answered, but not all.
Pronin devotes two chapters to Maiakovskii's unproduced screenplay Kak pozhivaete? (1926). I personally am glad that Pronin understands that this is one of Maiakovskii's most exciting works from this period. He notes that this film is expressive and praises its visuality, remarking that Maiakovskii was used to putting images and concepts together from his work on the ROSTA posters (54–56). The film also features a maximum of cinematographic tricks that were available in 1926 (early special effects). No treatment of Maiakovskii seems to be complete without a reference to his suicide, which Pronin finds to be cinematographic.
The next section of the book is about Vertov, mostly about Vertov as a poet. Pronin relies on a previously published article by L.M. Roshal΄, “Stikhi kinopoeta,” but goes much farther. In his early years before he became a film director, Dziga Vertov used poetry as a creative way to express himself (95). Both sections of the book are chronological, going through the artists’ lives as they occupy themselves with film and writing. One of the most curious aspects of Vertov's life was his two years studying at the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute in Petrograd, the most liberal institution of higher education at the time. Room and Grigori Boltiansky also studied there, and it is fascinating to ponder potentially psychological elements of their work (109–10).
As a student Vertov was quite taken by the verses of Maiakovskii and his fellow futurist Velimir Khlebnikov (114–18). Next comes his creation of his pseudonym, which was an important play with sound. He was born David Abelevich Kaufman (118–20). In the first years after the civil war, Vertov's poems were centered on his love for his first wife, Olga Toom (123–27). After the revolution Pronin sees evidence of trauma in Vertov's poetry. He claims Vertov was traumatized by the revolution because it reminded him of the very traumatic Bialystok pogrom, which he experienced as a child, having been born in Bialystok (127–35), maybe around 1922 (Pronin carefully takes us though the problematics of dating.) Vertov started writing poems about film (137–40). From 1930 to his death in 1954, Vertov wrote over seventy screenplays.
Toward the end of the book Pronin writes about the many commonalities between Vertov and Maiakovskii. Both were traumatized. Man with a Movie Camera shares things with Kak pozhivaete? (1926). The book ends with four appendices: “Kak pozhivaete?,” which everyone should read. “V.V. Maiakovskii, Teksty o kino,” a sampling of Maiakovskii's articles and poems about film, “Programmnye kinostikhi Dzigi Vertova,” and “Izbrannye stikhotvoreniia Dzigi Vertova.”
