New proletarian poetry

New proletarian poetry is Mishka’s name for a literature fit for the revolutionary present: universal in scope, directed toward the future, and remade as an art of action. His vision rises from a historical analogy between tools and ideas, but the novel gives it a more complicated setting. The Count listens with joy because Mishka is his friend, even as the promised emancipation of the new age sits uneasily beside the coercion and scarcity of Soviet life.

The Congress and Its Promise

After the two old friends toast Grand Duke Demidov and reminisce, they turn to the coming congress of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, or RAPP. Mishka imagines an extraordinary assembly in which Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Mandelstam—writers whose differing styles had once made a shared dinner perilous—will gather to forge a new poetry. He presents their meeting as more than a literary event: it should make poetry universal, refuse deference, take the human spirit as its subject, and look toward the future.

The scale of this hope is enacted in Mishka’s movement. He leaps to his feet and paces from corner to corner of the Count’s small study, as if the room had become a private platform from which to lay out a public program. His speech expands in stages, from a gathering of writers to an account of human moral development and finally to the claim that poetry itself can travel across continents and transmit music to the stars. The intimate setting and the immense forecast remain together: a friend speaking in a small room about a literature meant for everyone.

From Stone, Bronze, and Iron to Steel

Mishka adapts the archaeologist Thomsen’s division of human history into Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. In his account, the material tool of each age gives form to its dominant ideas. Stone-age thought is as blunt as a club and as rough as flint. Bronze brings metallurgy, but its achievements soon include coins, crowns, and swords: an “unholy trinity” through which, Mishka argues, ordinary people were enslaved for a thousand years.

The Iron Age introduces a different trio: the steam engine, the printing press, and the gun. Mishka acknowledges that the bourgeoisie developed these tools to advance its own interests, but argues that the proletariat can use them to free itself from labor, ignorance, and tyranny. His proposed Age of Steel extends this faith in technological change to power stations, skyscrapers, and airplanes. The sequence makes his argument concrete: new forms of production and communication are not merely signs of a new period but instruments through which society—and poetry—might be remade.

The Shukhov radio tower gives that future a visible emblem. Mishka describes its spiraling steel structure as both beautiful and useful: it can broadcast news, intelligence, and Tchaikovsky’s music into the homes of citizens within a hundred miles. From this example he moves to a sweeping prediction that Russian morality will advance alongside technology, bringing an end to ignorance and oppression and the arrival of human brotherhood. The tower thus joins the practical and the ideal in his speech: steel carries information, music, and the hope of a changed social order.

A New Form, and the Count’s Response

For Mishka, poetry must keep pace with those transformations. He contrasts the older art of quatrains, dactyls, and elaborate tropes with a new poetry of action, able to cross continents and send music outward. The novel’s narrator turns this program into a recognizable performance: the poet must speak for a school with a manifesto, claim the present through the first-person plural and future tense, and make use of rhetorical questions, capital letters, and exclamation points. Above all, the work must be new. This description both conveys the movement’s formal ambition and gently exposes the mannerisms through which novelty announces itself.

The Count’s response depends on who is speaking. Had he overheard the same kind of address from a student in a coffeehouse, he might have noticed its conventions with amusement. Hearing it spill from Mishka instead fills him with joy. The distinction does not establish the Count as a convert to the program; it shows his affection for the person whose enthusiasm animates it. The novel also places that affection against the Count’s sense of being out of step with his times. He struggles to understand the inclinations and aspirations of his peers, finding solace in overlooked books and listening in bafflement as his roommate recounts salon dramas. Mishka’s speech gives him a rare occasion when the present arrives not as an alien fashion but as the living conviction of an old friend.

A small contrast elsewhere sharpens the limits of the word new. After a young couple raise their glasses to the Count in gratitude and kinship, he reflects that young love has nothing new about it. The remark does not directly refute Mishka’s aesthetic program; it distinguishes the novelty claimed for a historical moment from experiences that persist across eras. That distinction suits the book’s treatment of revolutionary language: a new age may proclaim a break with the past, while affection and human attachment remain stubbornly familiar.

The Promise Beside Its Consequences

The novel places Mishka’s confidence in industrial progress near an account of the First Five-Year Plan and the agricultural campaign intended to support it. The plan’s demand for more grain from the countryside leads, in the narrative’s description, to the exile of a million kulaks, including some of the regions’ most capable farmers. Peasants resist imposed innovations; tractors are scarce; weather contributes to a collapse in output. Yet the need to feed the cities brings increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint. By 1932, these forces produce widespread hardship in agricultural provinces and starvation deaths for millions of peasants in Ukraine.

This history makes a tension in Mishka’s scheme visible without erasing the sincerity of his hope. He imagines the engine and other modern tools freeing people from labor and oppression; the surrounding account shows a planned transformation turning rural life into a target of quotas, requisitions, and state coercion. The novel does not need to claim that poetry caused these outcomes to set the two visions in disturbing proximity. The language of collective advance promises liberation, while the lived costs of advancement fall heavily on those whose labor is meant to sustain it.

Poetry, Records, and Control

The novel’s attention to writing also extends beyond poetry. At the Boyarsky, the assistant manager introduces a chain of written orders, ledger entries, cooking slips, kitchen logs, confirmation slips, and stamped receipts before a dish can reach a table. The Count’s objection is not to pencils or paper: he values the written word and recalls its power to move people. His concern is that this procedure changes the context of service, replacing a waiter’s attention to diners with a sequence of records and authorizations. The contrast complicates any easy identification of writing with emancipation. A written form can carry a poem toward an imagined public, or make a routine process legible through layers of paperwork.

That administrative possibility darkens further when the Count opens the Bishop’s filing cabinets. Alongside hotel operating reports are files on guests and staff, including Arkady, Vasily, Andrey, Emile, and Marina. Their folders catalogue faults such as tardiness, impertinence, disaffection, drunkenness, sloth, and desire. The Count recognizes that these records can be accurate and still radically partial: they preserve human flaws while leaving virtues out of view. Beside Mishka’s ambition for poetry that takes the human spirit as its subject, these files offer a stark counter-image of representation—writing that reduces people to administratively useful weaknesses. New proletarian poetry therefore matters not simply as a style but as a promise about what language might attend to, and whom it might serve; the surrounding narrative keeps that promise in tension with systems that classify, manage, and constrain.