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  But there’s no way of knowing whether she would have retained that opinion of the poet if she’d known of the life he led in Moscow after his return from Paris.

  FOUR

  The Mayakovsky Legacy

  Throughout the thirteen years that Mayakovsky and the Briks had shared a home, Lili, who went through dozens of new men each year, tolerated Volodia’s affairs, even approved of them, as long as they remained lighthearted—“let the kid release his energies” seems to have been her attitude. But even though she had not slept with him for several years, any serious emotion he displayed for a woman was a cause for her great concern. There was the issue of family finances: Volodia was the Briks’ meal ticket. There was also Lili’s determination to remain the unique, unrepeatable love of a great poet’s life. So in the spring of 1929, once Tatiana Yakovleva had entered into Mayakovsky’s very poetry and inspired his most passionate love lyrics, Lili realized that she was dealing not with another pretty miss but with her most dangerous rival to date. (She could not have been thrilled by the line in “Letter to Comrade Kostrov” that described his emotions for Lili as “the stalled engine of the heart.”) Seven months earlier, she had mobilized her sister to counteract the threat of the American girl. This time, she turned to her husband to make the decisive move.

  In May 1929, within two weeks of Mayakovsky’s return from Paris, a pretty twenty-one-year-old actress at the prestigious Moscow Art Theater received a call from Osip Brik. Veronika (“Nora”) Polonskaya, a pert, dimpled blonde who was married to a popular older actor of that company and was just beginning to rise in its lower ranks, was somewhat surprised to hear from Brik, with whom she had only a brief acquaintance. He was proposing an outing to the horse races with Vladimir Mayakovsky. Would she join them? She accepted.

  Lili had been on target: Volodia began to pursue Nora relentlessly. Although she was initially put off by his brusqueness, upon their first tête-à-tête the young woman was taken by his “gentle, delicate” manner, by the beauty of his powerful bass voice, by his commitment to Bolshevik principles. Within a few weeks, “Norochka” was returning the poet’s infatuation and coming to his little studio on Lubiansky Passage every day. That summer, they spent some idyllic time together in the Yalta and Sochi area, where he had been sent on another extensive lecture tour.

  As I read through Nora Polonskaya’s memoirs at the archives of Moscow’s Mayakovsky Museum, I was, for the first time, rather confused by the state of the poet’s emotions. After all, this was a man renowned for his sincerity and forthrightness, a man who had never been dishonest or duplicitous with any woman, or, for that matter, with any male comrade. By this stage of my research, I had grown terribly fond of Vladimir Vladimirovich, perhaps even a bit enamored of him, and I tended to invent excuses for him whenever his conduct was questionable. Well, I rationalized on this occasion, Volodia needed some immediate consolation; he was noted for his highly developed libido, just think of the frustration he must have experienced throughout the months of courting my primly chaste mother…. But his affair with Polonskaya was made all the more perplexing by the ardor of a letter he wrote to Tatiana on July 16, 1929, just before he left for his lecture tour of the Crimea, where he planned to meet with the actress.

  Tanik, I’ve begun to miss you terribly, terribly. You must notice yourself that you almost do not write to me. Does it bore you?

  My child, write me and promise to visit me if I will need it badly. Give me until October (we’ve both decided), and then I can’t imagine being without you. From September on I’ll begin to make wings to fly to you. Do you still remember me? I’m so tall, pigeon-toed and antipathetic. Today I’m also gloomy.

  My own beloved Tanik, don’t forget that you and I are rodnye [kin to each other] and that we are each essential to the other.

  I hug, kiss and love you

  Your Vol

  The phrase I’ve translated as “we’re kin to each other,” “my rodnye,” is a loaded and deeply tender one. Rod means “family, birth, origin” and when used by lovers “my rodnye” implies that the loved one is “one of my own family.” These are words that no Russian man would use toward a woman for whom he has an exclusively physical attraction, and they give an added depth of tenderness to Mayakovsky’s letters. He uses “rodnaia” again as he once more reproaches Tatiana for not writing to him, and he tries to speed her return with yet another salvo of praise for Soviet society.

  My own beloved Tanik,

  Excuse me for writing so often. You see, I don’t pay attention to your silence. Why do you, rodnaia, take so many counts on our exchange of letters?? Detka [little girl]…. We are now better off, in this society, than people have been at anytime, in any place. Such a huge communal work has never been known in human history, Tanik! You’re a super-capable girl. Become an engineer. You can do it, don’t spend yourself entirely on hats…. I want this so much, Tan’ka the engineer somewhere in Altai [a mountain chain in central Asia]. Let’s do it, right?

  Dear child, write and love. I want to see you sooner.

  The notion of my frivolous, luxury-loving mother returning to an increasingly frugal Russia to build socialism as an engineer in central Asia always strikes me as very comical. On the other hand, the last of Mayakovsky’s letters to have survived, written on October 5, often brings tears to my eyes.

  My own beloved [rodnaia]. I don’t have and could never have any other endearments for you. Keep this word in mind for at least 55 years.

  Could it be true that you don’t write only because “I’m not very generous with words”? This is absurd—Impossible to describe and document all the sorrows that make me even more silent. Or even more likely, could it be that French poets, or people of more common professions, are now more pleasing to you?…But if that’s the case then no one at any time will ever convince me, and you will not become less beloved to me.

  My telegram to you was returned with a message that they could not find you at that address. Write, write, write, dear child. I still don’t believe that you’ve grown indifferent to me. Write today. Books are piled up and other news which are making little screams and begging to go into your paws.

  I kiss you, love you

  Your Vol

  Mayakovsky’s reference to “all the sorrows that make me even more silent” (in earlier letters he had already mentioned “many unpleasantnesses”) has everything to do with the events of 1929, what Russians call god velikogo pereloma, “the year of the great turning-point.” It was in 1929 that the relatively relaxed and pluralistic first decade of Soviet culture came to an end. And to follow the denouement of Mayakovsky’s romance with my mother, one needs to grasp that year’s pivotal importance.

  The autumn of 1928 had marked the ascendance of Joseph Stalin to unchallenged power in the Communist Party hierarchy and the beginning of his violent transformation of Soviet society. This entailed, among other measures, the forced collectivization of Soviet peasantry; a series of Five-Year Plans, which called for a quadrupling of the output in heavy industry and returned the management of all enterprises to the central government; a resumption of cultural isolation from the West; and—most relevant to Mayakovsky—the imposition of strict party controls over education and culture. As steps in the cementing of his dictatorship, in January of 1929 Stalin banished Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Union and soon began to single out cultural organizations and particular writers for opprobrium. By that autumn, Stalin’s regime was making it increasingly difficult to travel abroad.

  This “Revolution from Above,” as it is called, also enabled the Soviet Union’s most oppressive literary faction, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (known as RAPP), to gain ascendance over literature. In December 1929, an editorial in the Communist Party paper Pravda demanded that all Soviet writers join RAPP and adopt its edicts, which required a strict adherence to proletarian values, and the elimination of all “bourgeois” and “deviationist” writing. This is the context within which Mayakovsky, in the
early fall of 1929, was either denied a visa to return to Paris to continue his courtship of my mother or else warned that he should not even risk the political dangers of asking for one.

  The autumn of 1929 is also that moment at which any precise rendering of my mother’s romance with Mayakovsky becomes extremely difficult and falls prey to conjecture and to aging survivors’ capricious memories of the past. But whatever versions are accepted, it is clear that the same historical forces that were about to cleave asunder, for many decades, the two Russias—the increasingly rigid Soviet state and the beloved lost homeland of émigré communities throughout the world—were central to the finality of the lovers’ separation.

  My mother’s version of the denouement goes as follows: Shortly after she received that last October letter from Mayakovsky, she heard from Elsa Triolet that he had been denied a visa. (Although Tatiana’s ferocious pride was to keep her from ever admitting it, it is most probable that Triolet, at her sister’s suggestion, had also advised Tatiana of his romance with Polonskaya.) Smarting from that revelation, warned by friends of the growing repression in Russia, recalling the poet’s repeated hints, in whatever letters had got through to her, about all the great “difficulties” he had been having, she decided, sorrowfully, that their future together was doomed. And she set about making other plans for her life. One of the two persons in the “vicious magical circle” of suitors she had mentioned earlier that year to her mother seems to have been a dashing French diplomat four years her elder, Vicomte Bertrand du Plessix, a specialist in Slavic languages who for the previous year had been posted as an attaché at the French embassy in Warsaw. In mid-October of 1929, when he returned to Paris for one of his rare home leaves, she accepted his offer of marriage.

  Unfortunately, between mid-October and late December 1929, the period during which my mother must have first mentioned du Plessix in her letters to Russia and announced her engagement and pending marriage, there is a total gap in her correspondence with her mother: No letters have survived. Documents at the Mayakovsky Museum reveal that in the early 1930s the Soviet secret police made several visits to my grandmother’s flat in Penza and absconded with possessions much valued by Stalin’s regime: missives from abroad. Whether by coincidence or by design, the visitors seized all letters written by my mother in the last two and a half months of 1929. Her last October communication, posted on the fifteenth of that month, tersely states that “Mayakovsky is not coming this winter.” There are no more letters until late December, after her marriage to du Plessix. So for this phase of the romance’s denouement, it is instructive to hear out Lili Brik, who decades later recalled in a letter the October evening upon which Mayakovsky first heard of my mother’s engagement.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky in Moscow, late 1929.

  We were quietly sitting at the dining room table on Gendrikov Street. Volodia was waiting for his car, he was about to go to Leningrad for several appearances…. A letter came from Elsa. As always, I started to read the letter aloud. Along with the various other events that Elsa was sharing with us was the news that Yakovleva, whom Volodia came to know in Paris and with whom, out of sheer inertia, he was still in love, was engaged to marry some French viscount or other, that she was going to marry him in a church, in a white dress and orange blossoms, that she was very concerned that Volodia not learn about this because he might cause a scandal.

  In this transparently disingenuous passage, in which the phrase “out of sheer inertia” gives away Lili’s hostility to my mother, Brik then pretends that she would not have read that passage to Mayakovsky if her sister had warned her properly. She continued: “Volodia had grown pale. He stood up and said: ‘Well, time to go.’ ‘Where are you off to?’ I asked. ‘It’s early, the car hasn’t come yet.’ But he took up his suitcase, gave me a kiss and went out.”

  Lili’s account of the poet’s state of mind also includes the recollections of his chauffeur, who related that upon meeting him that night the poet had uttered a curse, then remained totally silent during the ride to the station. “Do excuse me, please do not be angry with me, Comrade Gamazin,” he said as they arrived. “Please, my heart is aching.” The following day, Lili Brik decided to follow Mayakovsky to Leningrad to boost his morale. As they rode together from one crowded reading to another, Brik reports, Mayakovsky kept making derisive comments about French nobility—whatever his growing difficulties with the Soviet regime, he was particularly vexed that he had been upstaged by an aristocrat in the affections of the woman he loved. “‘We’re not French viscounts, we work hard,’ he would say, or ‘If I were a baron.’” Even Brik admits that Mayakovsky lived in a state of denial from then on, embittered and refusing to accept the reality of Tatiana’s impending marriage.

  Tatiana and Bertrand du Plessix on their honeymoon in Italy, December 1929.

  As for Tatiana’s recollections of October 1929, they are excerpted from a series of conversations with the closest friend she had in her last decade of life, the Russian scholar and ballet historian Gennady Smakov. Smakov was planning to write a biography of her, and she spoke more candidly with him about the past than she had with anyone to that time.

  “I loved [Mayakovsky], he himself knew it, but…my love was not strong enough to go away with him,” my mother told Smakov. “And if he’d returned a third time I’m not absolutely sure that I wouldn’t have left…. I missed him terribly. I might well have left…. Fifty-fifty…. I got married in order to untie the knot. In the fall of ’29 du Plessix came to Paris and started courting me. Since Mayakovsky could not come I was totally free. I thought that he did not want to take on that heavy a responsibility, to be stuck with a young woman…. I thought to myself, perhaps he just got scared? How to explain to you? I suddenly felt free…[du Plessix] came openly to [my grandmother’s] house—we had nothing to hide, he was a Frenchman, a bachelor, it wasn’t Mayakovsky, but I married him, and he was amazing towards me.”

  “Did you love du Plessix?” Smakov asks. A long pause follows. My mother was an honest woman.

  “No, I didn’t love him,” she replies. “It was a flight from Mayakovsky. Clearly, the frontier was closed to him, whereas I wanted to build a normal life, I wanted children, do you understand? Francine was born nine months and two days after the wedding.”

  My parents were married on December 23, 1929. My mother’s letters to my grandmother resume again six days later, during her honeymoon, which was spent in Italy. In the first letter, posted in Naples, she describes her wedding. Her uncle, Alexandre Iacovleff, had given her away. The wedding dress he had purchased for her had been “kolossal’niy ouspekh,” “a colossal success.” She and Bertrand were about to set forth for Pompeii. He was “enormously caring, a tender husband and a marvelous companion.” (Within three years, they were estranged. Perhaps my father sensed that my mother had not loved him. Perhaps he was the first to realize—as I only began to when I finally read these letters—that Mayakovsky was Tatiana’s only great love.)

  Mayakovsky’s last months brought a succession of heartbreaks. His play The Bathhouse, a violent attack on the increasingly rigid Soviet bureaucracy, which he felt was betraying the 1917 revolution, was received with what one of his friends described as “murderous coldness.” But the public’s animosity was becoming far more personal. Even though he seldom used the car he had brought to Lili the previous year and had to get her permission each time he wished to borrow it, he was being censured for owning such a luxurious and foreign-made possession. He was even criticized for the pen of foreign make he always carried on him—the Waterman that had been my mother’s parting gift. His exhibition Twenty Years of Work, which opened on February 1, 1930—posters, paintings, graphics, diverse editions of his books—was boycotted by all official writers’ groups and was visited almost exclusively by students. He paced the empty rooms, with a “sad and austere face, arms folded behind him,” as Polonskaya described him. (“Just think, Norochka, not one comrade writer came!” he complained to her.) On a J
anuary day, he read his ode to Lenin at the Bolshoi Theater in the presence of Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, but this honor did not cheer him. The winter of 1929–1930 appeared to be a year of artistic failures. He felt increasingly isolated, and Polonskaya wrote that with the exception of his poem “At the Top of My Voice,” which was to remain unfinished, he was experiencing a true writer’s block. The prologue to that poem, in which he describes himself as “a latrine cleaner / and water carrier / by the revolution / mobilized and drafted” and laments that he had been “setting [his] heel on the throat of [his] own song,” is as telling a comment as any on his disillusionment. It displays his increasingly painful awareness of the dissonance between communist ideals and their reality, between his personal longings and the stranglehold of the collective, between the oppression of the Soviet state and the freedom essential to any poet’s psychic survival.

  In the winter months shortly after my mother’s marriage, Mayakovsky, according to Nora Polonskaya, began pressing her to leave her husband and marry him. But after the New Year, their affair went through a difficult phase: Nora had been pregnant with his child and had an abortion; afterward, she was sexually indifferent to him. Friends noted that “a mood of helplessness, loneliness, heartache…had come over him,” and that for the first time in his life he was drinking heavily and regularly.

  In February of 1930, in the midst of this emotional disarray, Mayakovsky further alienated his old friends by joining RAPP, the party-led organization that had begun to attack the more independent Soviet intellectuals for their “anarchism” and “Trotskyist deviation.” RAPP, which Osip Brik had urged him to join as a way of allaying his isolation, was looked on with horror by the writers Mayakovsky most honored. But even that sinister group reacted disdainfully to Mayakovsky’s move: Its officials placed him in a small section of minor and beginning writers and assigned him to the humiliating process of “reeducation.” Audiences heckled him increasingly at his readings, and even students—traditionally his most devoted audience—had begun to tell him that his poems were unintelligible. Moreover, the Briks’ home on Gendrikov Street had ceased to offer him relief from solitude: Osip and Lili had gone to England at the end of February; it was the first time since they had all lived together that both of them were away. He had no one but Nora to turn to. He insisted she remain with him at every moment of the day. Bitter arguments arose because she wanted to look after her own budding career.