Russian Association of Proletarian Writers

The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers enters the narrative at a moment when its inaugural congress is expected to bring together writers who, not long before, could not safely dine at the same table. Through Mishka’s account and the Count’s observations, the organization appears at once as a forum for collective literary work and as the embodiment of an ambitious promise: that poetry can match a transforming age, address a broad public, and help shape the future. The account presents that promise vividly, while leaving room to distinguish Mishka’s idealism from the congress’s concrete proceedings.

Identity and Historical Moment

The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers is identified in the narrative by its acronym, RAPP, and by its inaugural congress, which Mishka attends. The gathering is scheduled for June. Its significance, as he describes it to the Count, lies partly in the unlikely assembly of writers with differing styles: Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Mayakovsky, and Mandelstam are all expected to be present. Mishka emphasizes the change in circumstance. These writers had recently faced the danger of arrest if they shared a table; now, he imagines them gathering to make a new poetry together.

That account makes the congress more than a meeting of literary professionals. Mishka describes it as an extraordinary assembly at an extraordinary time, where creative differences might be gathered into a common undertaking. His forecast is deliberately expansive: the new poetry should be universal, should not defer to authority, and should take the human spirit and the future as its subjects. These are Mishka’s stated hopes for the congress, not a neutral inventory of resolutions already adopted. The distinction matters: the organization is shown through the aspirations of one of its participants as well as through the work the narrative reports taking place.

Mishka’s Program for New Poetry

Mishka gives the proposed literary change a historical frame. He contrasts earlier ages with what he calls the Age of Steel, presenting new technologies as the material conditions of a new cultural moment. In his account, the tools of an earlier age—the steam engine, printing press, and gun—had been developed for bourgeois interests, yet also helped the proletariat struggle against labor, ignorance, and tyranny. He then points to power stations, skyscrapers, and airplanes as signs that a different age has begun.

For Mishka, poetry must change with it. He contrasts the inherited craft of quatrains, dactyls, and elaborate tropes with an art of action, imagining writing that will travel across continents and transmit music to the stars. The scale of the language is part of the program: poetry is not to remain a private ornament but to move outward with the technologies and public ambitions of the new era. His image of the future is reinforced by the Shukhov radio tower, which he describes as a two-hundred-foot spiral of steel. From it, he says, news, intelligence, and even Tchaikovsky’s music could reach citizens within a hundred miles. He treats that capacity to broadcast as evidence of a wider transformation, predicting an end to ignorance and oppression and the arrival of human brotherhood. The account records this as Mishka’s hopeful interpretation of technological and moral progress, rather than confirming that the promised transformation has occurred.

Congress Work and Collective Solidarity

When the Count later meets Mishka at Shalyapin, the congress has begun, and Mishka is eager to report on its work. He describes a day without hushed conversations, dozing, or idle pencil-fiddling: in every corner, people were working. The Count’s account supplies the specific forms that work took. Participants drafted Declarations of Intent, Proclamations of Allegiance, and Open Statements of Solidarity.

The solidarity described extends beyond writers themselves. It encompasses fellow writers, publishers, and editors, but also masons, stevedores, welders, riveters, and street sweepers. That breadth gives the congress’s collective language a concrete social reach: the intended community of literary affiliation crosses from the production and circulation of writing into manual labor. At the same time, the repeated declarations and statements show how the congress makes solidarity visible through formal acts of writing. The organization is thus associated not only with Mishka’s vision of poetry’s future, but with the practical production of documents that publicly name alliances.

The Congress as Public Performance

The first day’s intensity is conveyed through its schedule and its staged moments. Dinner is not served until eleven at night, at a table set for sixty. Mayakovsky addresses the gathering without a lectern: after the plates have been served, he bangs on the table and stands on his chair. His poem, with its insistence on shining everywhere and at all times, draws unrestrained applause and the smashing of glasses.

Mishka retells the scene with such animation that he nearly climbs onto the banquette in imitation of Mayakovsky, almost knocking over his beer. He instead delivers his own seated oration, one finger raised. This small reversal—Mishka physically contained by the seating while his language races outward—makes the congress’s rhetoric theatrical even in recollection. After the applause subsides and the diners prepare to eat their chicken, another participant, Zelinsky, gets up on a chair. The narrative moves on at that point; it establishes the congress’s atmosphere of spontaneous public address without supplying the substance of Zelinsky’s intervention.

Narrative Perspective and Significance

The Count’s response gives the organization’s presentation an affectionate counterpoint. Hearing a similar speech from an unknown student in a coffeehouse, he might have noticed its characteristic techniques: the collective first-person plural, future tense, rhetorical questions, capital letters, exclamation marks, and insistence that everything be new. But the speaker is Mishka, his old friend, and that changes the Count’s reaction. Rather than viewing the speech from a distance, he feels joy as Mishka’s ideas spill out.

This contrast prevents the account from treating the congress’s language as either a settled doctrine or a simple joke. The Count recognizes the conventions of a new poetic manifesto, while his delight in Mishka makes the performance personally meaningful. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers is therefore presented through two registers at once: the public ambition to unite literary innovation with social solidarity, and the intimate scene of a friend speaking with conviction. Its significance in these passages lies in that conjunction. The congress promises a poetry equal to a new age; the narrative lets readers see both the scale of the promise and the particular enthusiasm with which Mishka believes in it.