Them Read online

  In the course of perfecting his niece’s education, Sasha, quite sensibly, led her to learn a trade. A year after she arrived in Paris, he had her enter the École de Couture, an institution somewhat analogous to New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where she received a degree in less than a year. He then persuaded a former mistress of his, an émigré hat designer with the exotic name of Fat’ma Hanoum, to take Tatiana on as an apprentice. By the time she was twenty-one, she was doing her uncle proud. She had developed hew own private clientele, designing hats often inspired from the paintings he taught her to love. (Cranach and Vermeer would remain particular favorites.) She could now hold her own at a dinner table without more than two or three faux pas a night—some of them retained intentionally, to amuse her audiences. She used her imagination to dress superbly on a minimal income, making beads and a bit of rabbit fur look like a page out of Vogue, and was hobnobbing with the crème de la crème of French and Russian émigré circles—Prokofiev, Chagall, Elsa Triolet—and was being courted by some of Paris’s most fascinating men.

  As the years wore on, as the harrowing, tragic Croisière Jaune succeeded the relatively calm Noire and her beloved uncle met his untimely end, the patterns of Sasha’s life sometimes influenced my mother adversely. She developed a repugnance of exotic destinations. She insisted that ancient curses hung over many of those Oriental sites he had crossed, that every member of the expedition who penetrated them came, within seven years, to an eerily premature, mysterious end. She thought it folly for anyone to travel to Africa or Asia or even South America, to any place outside the safe, controllable Western world. “It’s sheer folly to go to the Orient! My uncle died of it!” she would say to any friend planning a trip to Turkey or Iran or Egypt. India was a particular target of her disdain. “All that comes from India is dangerous,” she declared some thirty years ago, when I told her I was taking up yoga. Yet while bemoaning Uncle Sasha’s excessive passion for adventure and risk, she remained awed by his courage and his stoicism, avowed her deep gratitude to him, elaborated on his prodigal generosity, kindness, and elegance, preserved his archives well enough to pass some of them on to me, and missed him deeply for the rest of her days; as, I suspect, every member connected to the Iacovleff clan still does. He has remained our family’s most romantic and legendary figure, its principal model of valor and stoicism. He took risks that most of us would never have dared to take on; he lived adventure for us.

  Yet notwithstanding her passionate devotion to her uncle, her grandmother, and her aunt, a devotion that would imbue her with a lifelong sense of duty toward her kin, there had been one blight in my mother’s life which her relatives had not been able to eradicate: Despite the terrible suffering she had experienced in Soviet Russia, despite the fact that she had barely survived its anarchy and deprivations, throughout her early Paris years she remained, like many of her compatriots, terribly homesick. “Here people take better care of me and I’m eating,” she wrote her mother a year after arriving in France, “but all the same, none of it really feels right. Worst of all is the sense of solitude and loneliness…. I love love love Russia. Here everything may be wonderful, Paris may be the dream spot of the world, but I’m only a guest, and nothing will ever take the place of my native land, which I so treasure and revere.”

  In September of 1928, Tatiana’s homesickness was allayed by a traveler from Russia—Vladimir Mayakovsky, the revolution’s most celebrated poet—who was to be the love of her life.

  THREE

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

  He was over six feet tall, with a large, square jaw, a thick tousled mane of black hair, the massive-boned body of a boxer or sports trainer. His manner was brusque, brazen, often confrontational. He had a booming street heckler’s voice, and in his innumerable public appearances—he was already a celebrity by the age of twenty-two—argued insolently with those who challenged his ideas. Boris Pasternak, who instantly fell under the spell of the brawling young poet, dramatized him as “a handsome youth of gloomy aspect with the bass voice of a deacon and the fists of a pugilist,” who “sat in a chair as in the saddle of a motorcycle” and generally reminded him of a “young terrorist conspirator, a composite image of the minor provincial characters in Dostoyevsky’s novels.”

  Mayakovsky was one of the founders of Russian Futurism, which was born in the intellectual ferment that followed the abortive revolution of 1905 and was far more iconoclastic than similar modernist movements in Europe. Beyond finding aesthetic forms appropriate to the machine age, it aimed above all to shock and offend bourgeois sensibility through its sheer impudence and extravagance. Its manifesto, drawn up in 1912 by Mayakovsky and David Burliuk and named “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” called on all artists to “spit out the past, stuck like a bone in our throats” and to “throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc.etc. overboard from the steamship of Modernity.” In accord with these Futurist tenets, Mayakovsky’s imagery was apocalyptic, deliberately coarse, often violent, as if presaging the cataclysmic changes that would affect Russia in 1917.

  In “The Cloud in Trousers” of 1915, words jump into the poet’s mind “like a naked prostitute from a burning brothel,” the stroke of twelve falls “like a head from a block,” the poet’s thoughts “mus[e] on a sodden brain / like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch.” Perhaps the most radical innovator in the history of Russian poetry, Mayakovsky attacked the hieratic dignity of Russian verse by stripping it of all traditional poetic diction and enriching it with shards of popular ditties, folk sayings, puns, commercial jingles, and irreverent rhyming schemes. Equally revolutionary in his use of prosody, he favored accentual verse over the syllabic-accentual meter of nineteenth-century Russian poetry and often broke up his lines into ladder patterns to indicate where to pause for breath when reading his poems aloud. Here is an example from his “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry,” in which he affirms the political power of verse:

  These innovations, and the poet’s penchant for gigantism, created a hortatory art ideally suited to the immense audiences and vast public spaces that characterized Russian cultural gatherings in the revolutionary decades. However, there were two Mayakovskys. His patriotic odes expressed his rapturous joy in the violent transformation of society and his pride in the new Soviet regime; but the principal themes of his lyric poems—“plaintive…majestic…infinitely doomed…almost calling for help,” as Pasternak described them—were those of unrequited love, solitude, and self-destruction: “I am as lonely as the only eye / of a Man who goes to lead the blind” “The heart yearns for a bullet / the throat craves a razor.” This sense of solitude and chronic despair had roots, as it does in most poets, in the hardships of his childhood.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1928, photographed by Alexander Rodchenko.

  The youngest of three children, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in western Georgia, in a small village called Bagdati. His father, a member of the impoverished Russian gentry living in Georgia, supported his family by working as a forest ranger. In 1901, the family left for a larger town so that young Vladimir—Volodia to his family—might attend a proper school. Moody, restless, quick-tempered, early absorbed in books, the boy displayed a more than extraordinary precocity for politics. At the age of twelve, in the tumult of the “first” Russian Revolution of 1905, he began to steal his father’s shotguns to deliver them to local revolutionary parties. The following year, after his father died of blood poisoning—caused by a pinprick incurred while filing some papers—Volodia moved to Moscow with his mother and two older sisters, Ludmila and Olga. The family lived on the edge of starvation, and it was there, during his first year of high school, that Mayakovsky began to work with the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, the radical wing of which was known as the Bolsheviks. By the age of fourteen, he was a full-fledged member of that party, with the nom de guerre “Comrade Konstantine.” And at fifteen, having aided in the escape of a group of women prisoners
, he spent nearly a year in a Moscow jail, where he read Shakespeare, Byron, Tolstoy, and numerous other classics and wrote his first poems.

  By 1915, when he was twenty-two, the flamboyant, garrulous Mayakovsky was fraternizing with Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, and many other prominent writers. (Gorky is said to have been “so deeply touched” by “The Cloud in Trousers” that he wept on the poet’s vest.) By that time, Mayakovsky had also fallen desperately in love with the woman who longer than any other would serve as his muse—Lilia (Lili) Yuryevna Brik, née Kagan. The daughter of a prosperous Jewish jurist, the handsome, erotically obsessed, highly cultivated Lili grew up with an overwhelming ambition prevalent among women of the Russian intelligentsia: to be perpetuated in human memory by being the muse of a famous poet. When she was twenty, the vain, red-haired Lili married Osip Brik, the learned son of a wealthy jeweler whose politics, like hers, were ardently Marxist. The two made a pact to love each other “in the Chernyshevsky manner”—a reference to one of nineteenth-century Russia’s most famous radical thinkers, who was an early advocate of “open marriages.” Living at the heart of an artistic bohemia and receiving the intelligentsia in the salon of his delectable wife, Osip Brik, true to his promise, calmly accepted his wife’s infidelities from the start. In fact, upon hearing his wife confess that she had gone to bed with the famous young poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Brik exclaimed “How could you refuse anything to that man!”

  Mayakovsky’s sexual relationship with Lili would last only from 1917 to 1923. But his close friendship with Osip, who would become a noted literary scholar and a pioneer of formalist criticism (his books bore titles such as Rhythm and Syntax in Russian Verse) created a bond with both Briks that far transcended any sexual attachment. For the rest of his life, “Osia” Brik remained the poet’s most trusted adviser, his most fervent proselytizer, and also a co-founder with him of the most dynamic avant-garde journal of the early Soviet era, Left Front of Art, which published artists and writers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Isaac Babel. In 1918, when Mayakovsky and the Briks became inseparable, he simply moved in with them. Throughout the rest of his life, he made his home at a succession of flats that the Briks occupied. He also had a tiny studio space next to the old Lubianka prison, where he worked and carried on his numerous liaisons with other women. Osip Brik enjoyed his own occasional flings, and the ménage à trois seemed to prosper. The Briks offered Mayakovsky both independence and the stability of a family life, which he had not enjoyed since childhood. In return, the poet, who by 1918 had become a popular idol, became the Briks’ principal breadwinner; the substantial publishing royalties and lecture fees the poet earned in Russia and abroad supplemented the meager income the Briks made through literary criticism and occasional work that Lili found in films.

  Mayakovsky’s liaison with Lili, however, was as tormented as his friendship with Osip Brik was serene. Mutual friends remained amazed, throughout the following years, by the despotic manner in which she treated him and the fearful obsequiousness with which this dynamic, seemingly powerful man catered to his mistress’s every wish. (“If I’m a complete rag, use me to dust your staircase,” he wrote her in one particularly self-abasing letter.) There was a strong streak of masochism in Mayakovsky, and Lili seemed to have been invented to satisfy it. For years, with her tacit approval, his poems publicly lamented her heartlessness and inconstancy—in “The Backbone Flute,” of 1915, he likens her rouged lips to “a monastery hacked from frigid rock.” The poet’s unrequited passion for Lili even incited him to flirt with death, in 1916, by playing Russian roulette (that first time, he won).

  Mayakovsky’s self-sacrificing impulses were mirrored in his politics. In October of 1917, he settled into the revolution with greater enthusiasm than any other Russian writer of his stature. “To accept or not to accept? For me…this question never arose,” he wrote. “It is my revolution.” No task that exalted the Soviet regime was too menial for Mayakovsky. For some years, repressing the expression of all personal emotions, he celebrated, in rabble-rousing verse purged of Futurist excesses, the building of dams and factories, the lyricism of Soviet industrial machinery. “But now’s no time for a lover and his lass,” he wrote. “All my ringing poetic power I give to you / attacking class.” As a member of the People’s Commissariat for Education, and as a protégé of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar for education, Mayakovsky was sent to lecture all over Russia to proselytize for the Soviet regime. Covering as many as eighteen cities in one month, this “drum-beater of the Revolution,” as he called himself, was particularly adulated by factory workers and younger audiences and could draw thousands to his readings. He is credited with having played an important role in rallying the Russian people to Bolshevism.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky

  Beginning in 1919, during the civil war, he also used his considerable skills as a graphic artist to write and design governmental propaganda posters, sometimes churning out several posters a day. His popular commercial jingles—he wrote hundreds of them in a single year—promoted state-manufactured macaroni products, candies, galoshes, tires, even infant pacifiers: “Clothe the body, feed the stomach, fill the mind / Everything man needs at the Gum [the state-owned department store on Red Square] he will find,” and “The best pacifiers ever sold / He’ll suck on them till he’s very old.”

  In 1924, Mayakovsky produced a two-thousand-line poem commemorating the passing of Lenin, which was greeted with ovations wherever he read it. (“The genuine/wise/human/tremendous/Lenin…Yet wouldn’t I / who rarely came close to him /give / my own life /in a stupor of ecstasy, /for one little breath /of his.”) Throughout the 1920s, Mayakovsky was also sent to numerous foreign countries to propagandize his nation’s achievements, acting as cultural ambassador to Latvia, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, and also, in 1925, to Cuba, Mexico, and the United States, where he remained for several months and fathered a daughter by an American woman of Russian descent, Elly Jones. But the frantic pace of the poet’s patriotic activities, the tensions between his private and public personae, the suppression of his selfhood for the greater glory of his country took their toll in deepening depressions. Increasingly, he realized that by channeling all his energies into the revolution he was threatening to ruin his monumental talent, that he had stepped “on the throat of my own song.” “Only a very great, true love might still save me,” he told his close friend Roman Jakobson, who would eventually become one of the twentieth century’s most eminent linguists and literary critics. Jakobson looks on 1928, when Mayakovsky met Tatiana Yakovleva in Paris, as a pivotal year in which the poet “broke,” when “living alone had become intolerable to him, when he felt the need for an enormous change.”

  By 1928, Lili Brik’s younger sister, Elsa Triolet—a shrewd, winsome émigré who was devoted to her sibling—had been living in Paris and Berlin for eight years. Since Mayakovsky’s first trip to France, in 1922, when she served as Parisian guide and interpreter for the poet (who refused to ever learn any foreign language), Elsa had acted as Lili’s spy, reporting on each of the poet’s romantic escapades. But his foreign affairs did not give the sisters cause for alarm until 1928, when he set off for Nice to see his American girlfriend Elly Jones. She had brought the daughter she bore him, now two and a half years old, for a first visit with her father. Although Mayakovsky’s distaste for children was notorious, and the meeting, from Jones’s point of view, was a fiasco, Lili and Elsa were fearful that the poet might be persuaded to follow mother and child to America. To distract him from the American menace, Elsa decided to introduce Volodia to a beautiful, bright young Russian emigré of her acquaintance: my mother, Tatiana Yakovleva. On October 25, the very day of his return from Nice, Elsa took the poet to visit a Paris internist who had close links with the émigré community. She had learned from the doctor’s wife that Tatiana Yakovleva had an appointment with him that same morning.

  But the sisters’ scheming had unexpected results. Volodia kept his app
ointment at the doctor’s, took one look at Tatiana, and fell head over heels in love with her. Upon one of the few occasions my mother mentioned Mayakovsky to me, she said that he insisted on taking her home in a cab, spread his coat over her knees to keep her warm, and upon depositing her at the front door of her grandmother’s flat fell on his knees to declare his love. (“Yes, on his knees on the sidewalk,” my mother commented when telling the story, “and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.”)

  The coup de foudre seemed to be reciprocal. From October 25, Tatiana Yakovleva and Mayakovsky saw each other every day until December 2, when he had to return to Russia upon the expiration of his visa. Mayakovsky took pride in going about Paris with the tall blond beauty whose dynamism was equal to his, and he even respected her own considerable Puritanism—Tatiana, refusing the bohemian mores of many of her peers, was determined to keep her virginity until marriage. On her part, she was understanding about the enormous complications of Mayakovsky’s character. He dreaded solitude and was intensely jealous and demanding about his friends, wanting their undivided attention around the clock, looking on it as treason when a comrade was unable to play chess with him on the evenings he wished. He was in every sense paranoid and had a hypochondriac compulsiveness about physical hygiene, which may have been caused by the circumstances of his father’s death—he never touched doorknobs without a handkerchief protecting his hands, always carried a metal soap dish in his pocket, and when in any public place he wiped drinking glasses with his own handkerchief before touching them with his lips.