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