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  The relationship was also rife with family difficulties. Severely chaperoned by her prudish and rabidly anticommunist relatives, Tatiana had to do a lot of fibbing to carry on her courtship with the Soviet poet. Lying outrageously to her doting babushka, she enlisted a few loyal friends to say she was going to their houses. “Babushka would have had a heart attack if she’d learned whom I was dining with every night,” she recalled fifty years later. “The Bolshevik and her granddaughter, smuggled with great difficulty out of a starving Russia turned into hell by the revolution!”

  But Bolshevism didn’t seem to pose a problem for the lovers in the nostalgic landscape of Paris’s émigré community. Mayakovsky deliberately did not speak of world events to Tatiana, and her own anticommunist scruples were apparently absolved by the great narcissistic pleasure she took in the love of a famous poet. As for Mayakovsky, his infatuation had deepened when he discovered Tatiana’s extraordinary knowledge of Russian poetry. Sitting with him at the various cafés they frequented—La Coupole, Le Voltaire, La Rotonde, Le Danton, La Closerie des Lilas—she recited poetry by the hour. How could he not have been seduced when he heard her speak out the whole of his own “The Cloud in Trousers,” some seven hundred lines long? He told all his friends that Tatiana had “absolute pitch” for poetry, in the way some musicians have for their medium. She replaced Lili as his confidante. He informed her of his domestic arrangements with the Briks, and notwithstanding her primness she seemed to take his ménage à trois in stride. She even helped him to find a dress for Lili and to purchase the four-cylinder gray Renault Lili had asked him to bring back from Paris.

  The poet proposed marriage within the first fortnight, a suggestion Tatiana seems to have received in a mood of cool noncommittalness. Over a lunch at the Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse in November, he presented her with two poems he had composed and dedicated to her. They were written in his neat, slanting hand in a small green notebook, which I now own. One was called “Letter to Comrade Kostrov on the Essence of Love,” the other “Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva.” Here are sample lines from the first one, which recalled their meeting in the office of a Paris doctor:

  “Letter to Comrade Kostrov”—the first poem he had ever dedicated to any woman other than Lili Brik—was the most passionate love lyric Mayakovsky had written in years, and it intimated that he had found the “very great, true love” that, as he’d told Roman Jakobson, might yet save him.

  “Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva” was even more explicit: it urged her, in no uncertain terms, to return to Moscow with him. (The phrase “I’ll take you,” in the original Russian, has strong sexual overtones.)

  The couple were both striking in their statuesque beauty, their magnetic, powerful presences. Beyond their passion for poetry, they shared many predilections and character traits, chief among which was their great generosity, their narcissistic streaks, and the exhibitionism with which they each cloaked their shyness and deep insecurities. As Tatiana introduced Mayakovsky to her French and émigré acquaintances, the couple’s increasingly public romance was not lost on Lili’s sister, Elsa, who lived in the same little Montparnasse hotel as the poet and was beginning an affair with the French communist poet Louis Aragon. (They would subsequently marry and become the star couple of international communism.) Back in Moscow, informed of Paris events by Elsa and perhaps also by the secret police, which already thought of all important Soviet travelers abroad as potential defectors and kept close track of them, Lili Brik fretted: “Who is that woman Volodia is crazy about…to whom he’s writing poems (!!)…and who is said to faint when she hears she word ‘merde’?” she wrote her sister.

  Lili was to find out soon enough. Mayakovsky’s visa expired on December 3, and he had no choice but to go back to Moscow. Although he was scheduled to return to Paris in May, after the first run of his play The Bedbug, his separation from Tatiana seems to have been extremely sorrowful. Before leaving Paris, Mayakovsky went to a florist’s and ordered that a dozen roses be sent to Tatiana every Sunday until his return; every bouquet was accompanied by his visiting card, each one bearing a different message.

  In the first of many letters my mother wrote her mother shortly after Mayakovsky’s departure, her grief at her separation from the poet was mitigated by her naïve narcissistic pride in being his new muse.

  “He’s a remarkable man,” Tatiana wrote,

  totally different from the way I’d imagined him to be. He’s wonderful to me, and it was a great drama for him to leave here for at least six months. He telephoned me from Berlin, and it was one shout of pain. A telegram arrives every day, and flowers every week…. Our entire house is filled with flowers, it’s adorable of him…. I felt extremely sad when he left. He’s the most talented person I’ve ever met…. I think you’d be interested in hearing the poems “Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva,” and “Letter on Love.”

  She felt all the more drawn to Mayakovsky because he reminded her so poignantly of Russia.

  When I was with him I felt I was in Russia, and since he’s left I long for Russia all the more. But all of this I write to [you,] my mamulenka, and to no-one else. He left me two copies of “my” poems, I’m sending you one. For the time being don’t show these [poems] to anyone. They’ll be published soon. When he read them here they had a colossal success. They belong to his very best lyrical work.

  A few weeks later, in response to a letter from her mother, she continues to delight in her status as the poet’s muse. (She always sends her affectionate wishes to Père, as she refers to her second stepfather, Nikolai Alexandrovich Orlov.)

  However spoiled I am, he was absolutely amazing in his thoughtfulness and concern for me and I long for him terribly…. Most of the folk I meet here are “society people” who have no desire to use their brains…. M. challenged me…. [H]e stretched my mind, and, most importantly, he forced me to recollect Russia poignantly…. The masses here court him, his poetry captivates even the French with its rhythm and the power of his reading. “My” poems were a great success here. Did Père like them?…He evoked in me such a longing for Russia and for all of you. Literally, I almost came back. And now everything seems petty and flat. He’s such a colossal figure, both physically and morally, that after him, there is literally a void. He is the first man who has been able to leave his mark on my soul.

  Mayakovsky was writing to Tatiana with equal fervor. It was in his Futurist temperament to prefer telegrams to letters—they got there faster—and he sent her at least one a week. “Write more often got your letter am writing miss you incredibly love you kiss you your Vol,” some of his cables of that season read. “Received your letter thank you sent you letter and books miss you love you kiss you Vol.” As for letters, they came every few weeks. The first of them was begun on December 24, a few weeks after his return to Moscow.

  Tatiana in Paris in 1929, at the time of her romance with Mayakovsky.

  My own beloved Tanik.

  Letters move so slowly, and I need to know every minute what is on your mind. That’s why I send you telegrams. Send me piles of both! I take such joy in each word you write, I received one of your letters just now. I read it until I was saturated with it…. I’ve been writing a new play [The Bedbug] twenty hours a day without food or drink. My head swelled so from this labor that my hat ceased to fit…. I work like an ox, my muzzle bent, red-eyed…. Even my eyes gave up…. I still have to put cold compresses on them. But never mind…it doesn’t matter about my eyes, I won’t need them until I see you again, because outside of you there’s no one to look at.

  With a veneer of Soviet patriotism, the closing lines communicate his insistence that she return with him to the Soviet Union; Mayakovsky, however, seems to be aware that Soviet censors may be perusing his correspondence with an émigré, and his references to marriage are oblique and often coded.

  Still mountains and vastnesses of work—as soon as I’ll finish it I’ll rush to you. If my pen and I collapse from all this business you will come to
me. Yes? Yes?? You’re not a Parisian, you’re a true working girl. In our country all must come to love you, and everyone is obliged to be happy [when you return]. I’m carrying your name like a holiday flag on our urban buildings. It is flying and waving above me and I don’t lower it for a millimeter. Your poem [“Letter to Comrade Kostrov”] is being published in Molodaia Guardiia. I’ll send you the issue….

  I hug you dearest one, kiss you, and love you. Your Vol.

  (This diminutive of Volodia was a play on words. In Russia, vol means “ox,” an animal with which the poet particularly identified and in whose semblance he often caricatured himself in his letters or greeting cards.)

  Mayakovsky was usually honest with his women. Upon returning to Moscow, he had confirmed Lili’s suspicions about the beautiful Russian émigré and read her his “Tatiana poems.” “You’ve deceived me for the first time!” Lili said, in tears, furious that he had defied her long-held resolve to be his one and only muse. A short time later, he told her, over dinner at the flat they shared, that he wished to marry Tatiana and bring her back to Russia. Lili responded by smashing a precious piece of china.

  Mayakovsky’s second letter to my mother, written on New Year’s Eve of 1929, alludes to Lili’s jealousy of my mother.

  Sweet Tanik, my beloved,

  I don’t like it without you. Think about it and collect your thoughts (and then your belongings) and adjust your heart to my hope—to take you in my paws and bring you to us, to me in Moscow. Let’s think about it and then talk. Let’s make our separation a test.

  If we love each other, is it good to exhaust heart and time working through the telegraphic poles?

  It is the 31st now (at 12 midnight) and…I’m totally saturated with melancholy longing. Tender comrade, I clinked glasses and proposed a toast to you, and Lilia Yuryevna chided me, “If you’re suffering so why not immediately run to her?” Well, I shall run to you, but for the time being I must press on with my work. I work until my eyes get blurry and my shoulders crack…. When I’m totally exhausted I say the word ‘Tatiana’ and return to my paper. You and the other sun, you will later comfort me….

  To work and to wait for you is my only joy.

  Love, love me absolutely, please. I hug and love and kiss you.

  Vol.

  Lili Brik was not the only person worried about the romance. By December of 1928 Stalin had gained absolute power and was greatly tightening government control of the press. “Letter to Comrade Kostrov” came under some critical censure when it was published. The poet had been assigned to write verses about Paris for an official publication of the Communist Party; what kind of bourgeois decadence had he fallen into, celebrating the beauty of an émigré “framed in furs and beads”! Even my grandmother seems to have expressed concern about the romance, for the tone in which Tatiana wrote her a month after Volodia’s return to Russia was highly defensive.

  I’ve not at all decided to come back to Russia or, as you say, to “throw myself” at him. And he is not returning to Paris to “pick me up” but to see me…. Don’t forget that your girl is already 22, and that few women in their whole lives have been as loved as I have been in my short one. (This is something I inherited from you. I have a reputation here of being a “femme fatale.”)

  The young woman enjoyed flaunting her success to Mom. But she was torn between two conflicting emotions: the pleasure she took in her safe, glamorous Paris life and her budding career; and her temptation to return to suffering Russia and to the loved ones who remained there.

  Moreover, on the whole I don’t want to get married now: I’m too attached to my freedom and my independence—my hat business, my “orangerie” (my room is always filled with flowers). Various admirers want to take me to various countries, but of course none of them seem like anyone at all compared to M, and I would almost certainly choose him above all others; how wise and learned he is! And the possibility of seeing you again plays a large role in all this; by moments I long for you terribly.

  Then there is the first intimation that Tatiana, unbeknownst even to her closest confidante—her own mother—is furtively keeping a few Parisian men on the back burner who might offer her a solid, comfortable high-society marriage. “Furthermore I’m living through all kinds of dramas….” she writes her mamulenka. “There are two other suitors, it’s a vicious magical circle.”

  As for Volodia, seemingly unconcerned with the criticism of “Letter to Comrade Kostrov,” he rushed back to Tatiana on February 14, three months earlier than he had promised, not even waiting for notices of his play The Bedbug. (It was directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, with a musical score by Dmitri Shostakovich, and received mixed, but some enthusiastic, reviews.) The lovers’ reunion seems to have been as idyllic as their first meeting. They again saw each other daily and even traveled a bit together, going to Le Touquet for a weekend. He wrote her more poems, small ones this time, in a style parodic of nineteenth-century verse, which he signed “Marquis VM” (a teasing allusion to her fondness for titles). My mother detected a change in him: “He did not criticize Russia directly,” she recollected a half century later, “but he was obviously disillusioned.” This impression coincides with the recollections of a Russian friend with whom the poet spent an evening during a brief, financially disastrous gambling trip to Nice, and before whom he broke into sobs, saying, “I’ve stopped being a poet…. Now I’ma…state functionary.”

  In April, Mayakovsky’s visa ran out once more, and he was forced to return to Moscow. The suitors decided to meet again in Paris in October, when Tatiana would make up her mind about marrying him. She had given him a Waterman pen as a farewell present. Their farewell lunch, held at the Grande-Chaumière with a group of their mutual friends, had the aura of an engagement party. As they walked toward Mayakovsky’s train that evening, hand in hand, at the Gare du Nord, their mutual longing and sorrow were evident to their acquaintances.

  The first surviving letter of Mayakovsky’s after his return to Russia is dated May 15 and seems to address some pique Tatiana had expressed toward him.

  My dear, my sweet, my beloved Tanik,

  Only now has my mind cleared, and I can think and write a little. Please don’t scold and yell at me, there have been so many unpleasantnesses, from the very smallest (bug) size to the elephant size—that you mustn’t be upset at me. I’ll begin in order:

  I absolutely and enormously love Tanik.

  I’m only beginning to work, I will now with great care write my Bathhouse.

  A few lines follow in which he sums up the strikingly generous arrangements he’s made for her mother—a prodigality that was not lost on Tatiana—and informs her that he’s soon going off on a lecture tour of the Crimea.

  The letter continues: “Without your letters I can’t go on…. I’m longing for you as never before…. I love you always and entirely. Very and absolutely—Your Vol.”

  Another letter came in July. This time, Tatiana seems to have complained that he was sending her more telegrams than letters.

  My dear, my own, sweet and beloved Tanik.

  You promised to write every 3 days. I waited waited waited. I crawled under the carpet but the letter was two weeks old and a sad one. Don’t get sad, little girl. It can not be that we are not ordained to always be together…. You’re constantly saying that I don’t write you and what are my telegrams, puppy dogs??…

  I jump into work, remembering that until October there isn’t that much time…. My lovely, beloved Tanik don’t forget me, I love you so much, and I’m so longing to see you. I kiss all of you, your Vol.

  Write to me!!!!

  By July, both of them are complaining that they’re not receiving any letters. And one is led to wonder to what degree Russian security services might have blocked the correspondence between the Soviet Union’s poet laureate and his émigré love. One also wonders whether Lili Brik, who had full access to Mayakovsky’s studio on Lubiansky Passage, might have intercepted them.

  Tatiana�
�s longing, that summer of 1929, seems to have been as deep as the poet’s. “Write me and let me know his mood, I yearn for him terribly,” she writes in July to her sister Ludmilla, a destitute aspiring actress in Moscow. “Life seems very dull without him. There are very few people of his calibre here.” That same month, in a subsequent letter to her mother, she refers to the magnanimous way in which Mayakovsky was continuing to provide for her relatives in Russia: Upon Tatiana’s request, he had brought clothes for her sister and sent her some money. He had also organized a trip to the Crimea for her ailing mother, which, to Tatiana’s sorrow, her mother had declined, perhaps out of pride.

  “I was very sad that you didn’t want to go to the Crimea,” Tatiana wrote. “I’d so much dreamed about it. V. V. also wrote me a sad letter; he had hoped…to arrange this for you. After all, the best thing he can do for me (during such a long absence) is to look after you and Lilochka…. And it is this attribute of his that I particularly treasure; a limitless kindness and concern. I await his arrival in the autumn with great joy. There aren’t other people of his calibre here. In his relationship to women in general, and to me in particular, he is an absolute gentleman.”

  “Absolute gentleman” would remain an all-important phrase in my mother’s vocabulary until her death in 1991. On the rare occasions she talked about Mayakovsky, she unfailingly stated that he was “a man of irresistible charm and sex appeal,” with “a rare sense of humor,” a man, moreover, who, as she primly put it, was “extraordinarily careful about my virginity.” His “exquisite manners,” his “tenderness and concern” for her, his elegance and perfect taste in clothes (“he reminded one more of an English aristocrat than a Bolshevik poet”) made him the most “absolute gentleman” my mother had ever met.