Two different characters from different worlds: however
PGW was not unaware of Russia; in
Clicking of Cuthbert he discusses it at length; a place of novels of the utmost misery and where a fellow
could expect a brace of bombs coming through the window.
PGW and
Tretyakov both shared an interest in Futurism.
Tretyakov wanted to depict Communism's glowing future, a possible future Utopia. According to Evelyn Waugh
Blandings Castle is the original garden (of Eden) from which we are exiled. His characters are still in Eden. Two ideal futures then, equally
Utopian and unattainable but with very different biographies.
PGW died in a comfortable hospital bed with his final manuscript by his side;
Tretyakov threw himself off the landing at
Butyrki prison to escape Stalin's torturers; at around this moment Brecht was considering
Tretyakov as a possible member of his Society of Productive Writers (the Diderot club).
Hito Steyerl's installation
In Free Fall starts with a reference to
Tretyakov's Biography of an object and goes on to note that he himself became a falling object-in
Butyrki prison
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...while sitting on the back benches at the Prolekult conference in Armavir on September 25 1920 Klebnikov, during all the inflammatory business speeches, discovers the equation for the inner zone of heavenly bodies. Who was making these inflammatory speeches that he was so easily able to ignore? Possibly Tretyakov. The key to the equation is the number 3; history and the future can be grasped through multiples of 3.For Klebnikov the Triplex principle is true, prophetic and verifiable; it is not an aspiration. If Tretyakov had been able to break off from the Prolekult business and look over Klebnikov's shoulder he could have used the Triplex approach to calculate his own death in 1937-killed by Stalin. He could also have cheered Klebnikov up by calculating for him that he (Klebnikov) would die 3 years later of natural causes and not share the same completely predictable fate as himself 15 years later. The Triplex principle is still alive and well and can be applied to Geoffrey Farmer's Zappa-centred chronology: for example the role of the number 3 within the algorithm within Farmers's computer program that controls the music within the installation reflecting Zappa's idiosyncratic compositional forms.
