Them Read online

  On April 11, for the first time in his life, Mayakovsky failed to appear at a scheduled reading. On April 13, he telephoned several friends to see who was free to dine with him and was pained to hear that they were all busy. “It means that nothing can be done,” he muttered to the sister-in-law of one colleague. He ended up by going to the home of his friend Valentin Kataev, who describes the following scene: Volodia and Nora spent the evening writing each other notes on little bits of cardboard torn out of a chocolate box, which Mayakovsky, who drank more than usual that night, tossed across the table to Nora with the gesture of a roulette player. At 3:00 A.M. they went to their respective homes. In the morning, Mayakovsky came by to pick up Nora and take her to his studio. According to Nora’s memoirs, they quarreled a great deal—he pressured her to remain with him, while she insisted that she had to go to a rehearsal.

  At 10:15 A.M., barely able to free herself from her lover’s grip, Nora ran out of his room. A few seconds later, as she was beginning to run down the stairs, she heard a pistol shot. She hastened back into his room. It was still filled with smoke.

  Pasternak’s description of the mayhem caused in Moscow by the poet’s death is now a classic:

  Between eleven o’clock and twelve the waves were still flowing in circles round the shot. The news made the telephones tremble, covered faces with pallor and urged one towards the Lyubyanskoy passage, across the courtyard into the house, where the staircase was already choked with people from the town and with the tenants of the house, who wept and pressed close to one another, hurled and splashed against walls by the destructive force of the event.

  Pasternak’s analysis of Mayakovsky’s suicide is particularly lucid: “He killed himself out of pride, because he had condemned something in himself…with which his self-respect could not be reconciled.”

  The poet’s suicide was not as sudden as it initially seemed. He left a note, written in pencil in a large, clear hand on three pieces of nine-by-fourteen-inch paper, which he’d apparently started composing two days before his death. “To All [Vsem],” it began. “Do not blame anyone for my death, and please, no gossip. The deceased always detested gossip. Mother, sisters, friends, forgive me—this is not the way (I do not recommend it to others) but there is no other way out for me.”

  The suicide note went on to dictate that all his papers be taken care of by the Briks. Documents at the Mayakovsky Museum indicate that a highly placed official of the secret police (the Cheka or OGPU, as it was also called in those years), whose building was directly adjacent to the poet’s studio, was the first of Mayakovsky’s acquaintances after Nora to rush into his room. He seized all of Mayakovsky’s papers and a few days later handed most of them to the Briks, who, en route back from England, had received the news in Berlin and immediately come home. “I’m rummaging in Volodia’s little papers,” Lili wrote a friend in May, “and sometimes it seems to me I do what I have to do.”

  It is widely assumed by Mayakovsky scholars that Lili burned my mother’s letters within a few weeks of the poet’s death. That is certainly what my mother believed, and she claimed to have proof: “It was outrageous for Lili to burn my letters,” my mother said in 1981 in one of her talks with Smakov. “She had no right to do it…. I forgave her because she confessed to it in a short note which was delivered to me by a Soviet professor…. But I don’t understand why she did it. Was it jealousy? Why should she destroy all the traces and tokens of his love for me? If that was her intent, she should have burnt the ‘Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva.’…Well, that was not in her power.”

  There was one possible token of Mayakovsky’s love for my mother that Lili did not choose to destroy—a poem found, untitled, among recent entries in his notebook, which is now considered one of his greatest love lyrics. This, in fact, was the poem from which he borrowed several lines for his suicide note. (They are in roman type below.)

  Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.

  The Milky Way streams silver through the night.

  I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams

  I have no cause to wake or trouble you.

  As they say, ‘The incident is closed.’

  The love boat has smashed against the daily grind.

  Now you and I are quits. Why bother then

  to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.

  Behold what quiet settles on the world.

  Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.

  In hours like these, one rises to address

  The ages, history, and all creation.

  In using the lines for his last note, Mayakovsky changed only one word of the poem: The line “Now you and I are quits” was altered to “Now life and I are quits.”

  My mother heard about Mayakovsky’s death when she was four months pregnant with me. She was in Warsaw, where she had settled with my father after their honeymoon. Her relatives in Paris had cabled my father, asking him to keep her from reading any Russian newspapers. But in most European cities the news made the front page.

  “I was destroyed, utterly destroyed by today’s newspapers,” she wrote in her first bereaved note to her mother. “It was a terrible shock…. You’ll understand.”

  My grandmother seems to have expressed her concern that Tatiana was taking too much of the blame for the poet’s death, for two weeks later she wrote:

  Mamulechka moia rodnaia,

  I don’t think for a minute that I was the reason, except perhaps obliquely, for the true cause was his psychological crisis…. Over here also a lot is written about him, but how little was known about him as a person! Only now are people becoming aware of that, they are saying: “We have overlooked the most important thing—the powerful sources in his soul that led him to such an end.”

  Bertrand kisses you…. I kiss you too, endlessly, many times.

  Your Tania.

  (The baby is already moving.)

  All three of Mayakovsky’s women lived on to a good age, into their midor late eighties, and with varying degrees of civility carried on a war of the muses, flaunting the inspiration of this or that poem. Lili Brik, having been named literary executor, could readily claim any creation she wished as one of “her” poems, and for a few decades she managed to expunge all traces of Tatiana Yakovleva from the official Mayakovsky biographies. Along with her sister, Elsa Triolet, she was not above spreading malicious gossip concerning Tatiana, such as the comical legend that she was a courtesan and received men in back of her grandmother’s Paris grocery store.

  Meanwhile, Nora Polonskaya, short-shrifted because Mayakovsky had never officially dedicated any verses to her, grumbled that Lili had stolen from her the poem he excerpted in his suicide note, “Past One O’clock.” “There are many phrases there that refer directly to me,” she complained in her memoir. “It seems to me that Lilia Yuryevna much underestimated [Mayakovsky’s romance with Yakovleva],” Nora also said. “She wished to remain the unique, unrepeatable love of his life.”

  As for my mother, the only one whose inspirational power was directly recorded in the title of a poem, she pretended to maintain an Olympian aloofness from the muses’ fray. Arguing for quality over quantity, however, she coquettishly claimed that “Letter to Comrade Kostrov” and “Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva” were as splendid as any of the numerous poems Mayakovsky had dedicated to Lili: “He wrote her some beautiful lines, but none more beautiful than the ones he wrote to me.” (The two women never once met.)

  For a few years after his suicide—which was criticized by many as a most unsocialist act—publication of Mayakovsky’s work was reduced to a trickle. In the face of the growing Stalinist repression, the Soviet literary establishment was hedging its bets about what stands to take on him. And however one may feel about Lili Brik and her husband, one cannot deny that they were exclusively responsible for reviving a public cult of the poet. In 1935, with the help of her then lover, a very high-ranking army general, Lili got a letter through to Joseph Stalin that asked him to
rehabilitate Mayakovsky, reminding him that his verses were “the strongest revolutionary weapon.” Stalin replied with complaisant rapidity, writing directly upon the upper left-hand corner of Brik’s letter—in red pencil, in his bold, very large, slanting hand—“Comrade Brik is right: Mayakovsky was and remains the most talented poet of our Soviet era. Indifference to his memory and words is a crime.” The following day, Stalin’s comments appeared as headlines in Pravda; from then on, Soviet citizens were ceaselessly reminded, with litanylike repetitions of Mayakovsky’s civic virtues, that he was the quintessential “poet of the revolution.” For years to come, public squares, schools, subway stations, tractors, minesweepers, tanks, and steamships were named after him. In Pasternak’s scornful phrase, Mayakovsky was “propagated compulsorily, like potatoes in the reign of Catherine the Great.”

  A few decades later, on the main thoroughfare once called Gorky Street and now renamed Tverskaya, at a site one mile up from the Kremlin that is as central to Moscow as Rockefeller Center is to Manhattan, a twelve-foot-tall bronze statue of Mayakovsky was erected. He stands there to this day: His massive torso triumphantly arched, an imaginary wind billowing the folds of his baggy pants, he incarnates Soviet man at his most optimistic and confident, striding toward the greatest future ever devised for humankind.

  It is fitting that the only other major landmark on this main artery of the Russian capital is Pushkin Square, for these are the two poets most commonly memorized by Russian schoolchildren born after World War II. Ask most Russian adults which poems of Mayakovsky they had to learn by heart in school, and as surely as they know dozens of lines from Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” they will spout stanzas from stirring patriotic odes such as Mayakovsky’s “Khorosho” (“Very Good”) or from his “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” and “Left March.” Or if they’re under twenty-five and attended high school after the upheavals of 1991, they will have learned Mayakovsky’s romantic lyrics, which then began to replace his patriotic poems in school curricula. They might well have memorized love poems such as “Letter to Comrade Kostrov on the Essence of Love,” or “Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva.”

  Because of her secretiveness and her immense powers of seduction, my mother was the kind of woman who inspired a multitude of legends. And the myths that accreted about her have posed some surprising annoyances for me whenever I’ve returned to Russia. There was a widespread rumor in the 1970s, for instance, that I was Mayakovsky’s daughter, a myth in part traceable to a memoir of Mayakovsky written by the poet’s oldest friend, David Burliuk, when he was approaching eighty and may have been in his dotage. “In December of 1929 or January, 1930,” Burliuk alleges, “Tatiana…gave birth to a girl who was Mayakovsky’s daughter…. Mayakovsky used to refer to her as ‘my Froska.’” (I was born in September 1930, and “Froska” was the nickname initiated decades ago by my American husband, who could not pronounce the “Frosinka” diminutive always used by my mother.) The allegation came to haunt me in 1979, when I traveled to the Soviet Union to take part in a Soviet-American literary conference. On a nicotine-reeking night train bound for Tbilisi, Georgia, two of my Soviet colleagues came into my compartment and for some hours tried to convince me that I was the poet’s daughter. At the rise of dawn, I confronted them with the date on my passport. “This would have been an elephant’s gestation!” I exclaimed. “Someone faked your passport,” my Soviet colleagues parried back. So much for postdétente prowestern chic, I mused, which now made it desirable to establish an American progeny for the revolution’s most fabled poet.

  Fifty years after Mayakovsky’s death, upon one of the occasions when her friend Gennady Smakov prodded my mother to speak about Mayakovsky and the impact of his suicide on her life, she had this to say: “If he had come back for the third time in October of 1929 I would have returned to Russia…. I’ve not been able to reread his letters since his death. Even now I can not…. What I felt was far worse than grief. It was the most dreadful mourning.”

  Only upon rereading those words in the past few years—“the most dreadful mourning”—did I begin to see why my mother, who loved me deeply, had preferred that I not probe too far into her romance with the kind, doomed poet: Mayakovsky’s death, I now understood, had been the central fissure, the principal tragedy, of her life, one to which she never found any closure. And she did not want me to share her “most dreadful mourning” for him, at least not while she was still alive: Perhaps she wished to keep this mourning for herself; perhaps she wished to protect me from it.

  And perhaps she was right to do so. Exploring any tormented parental past—a process through which, as if trapped in a maze of distorting mirrors, we often confront our own past sorrows, our own sins and dreadful choices—can be a painful, even dangerous form of seeking information. It is a knowledge for which we all might have to pay a price, which is precisely why many of us keep postponing the task. Probing a personal history as closely linked to the calamities of this century as my mother’s and Mayakovsky’s, sensing the pain of the separation forced upon them, knowing how close my mother came to returning to Russia and becoming one of the twenty million persons lost in Stalin’s purges, has created a state of inner havoc that I’m only beginning to come to terms with. And yet, in the process of researching this segment of family history, I’ve acquired a new relative. In recent years, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky has truly become my rodnoi—a beloved lost kinsman whom I think of and grieve for often, but who finally fulfilled his wish to speak to “the ages, history, and all creation.” Through him, I may well have come into the most treasured part of my inheritance: my mother’s grief.

  My mother was not one to continue bearing grudges against any of Mayakovsky’s friends. In the mid-1970s, upon hearing that Lili Yuryevna Brik had been ill, my mother wished to send her a sign of conciliation. (Brik, who was crippled with pain after suffering a hip fracture, would commit suicide in 1978, at the age of eighty-six.) One evening in Paris, my mother was dining in her hotel room with a mutual friend of hers and Brik’s, Pierre Bergé, who was about to go to Moscow and had asked her whether she wished to send anything to her fellow muse. She went into her bedroom and brought back a small white handkerchief, neatly folded. “Just give this to Lili, and she’ll understand,” she said.

  The messenger flew to Moscow the following day, went to visit Lili Brik upon his first evening there, and handed her the white handkerchief. “Tatiana says you’ll understand,” he said.

  Lili gravely nodded her head. “I understand,” she said.

  The white flag, in most cultures, is a symbol of peace. For Lili and my mother, a white kerchief seemed to signal a truce of sorts and also became a sign of shared mourning.

  My discovery of the letters that enabled me to document my mother’s romance with Mayakovsky is a story by itself.

  From my adolescence on, I had been aware that my mother was not only one of Mayakovsky’s two muses but his last great love and that, somewhere in her possession, there was a cache of the letters he had written her during their romance. But I was equally aware of my mother’s profound reluctance to talk about any painful aspect of her private life. And so until her death in 1991 I continued to honor the chill silence she cast over the poet who was a central figure of her youth—in part out of my own dread of confronting the past, in part because like most mothers and daughters we lived in terror of each other.

  No one protected my mother’s secretiveness more fiercely than my stepfather, Alexander Liberman, the artist and publishing wizard who claimed to have been passionately in love with her for fifty years and who had brought me up since I was nine years old, when my own father died in World War II. Alex’s career, like my mother’s, typified the quintessentially American success story. Starting out, upon our arrival in the United States in 1941, with a menial job in Vogue magazine’s art department, he had risen within a year and a half to be its art director. Two decades later he had become editorial director of the entire Condé Nast publishing empire, which under
his guidance grew to include Glamour, Mademoiselle, House and Garden, Bride’s, GQ, Vanity Fair, Self, Gourmet, Condé Nast Traveler, Details, Woman, Allure, Architectural Digest, and Bon Appetit, as well as the scores of foreign editions—German, French, Korean, Russian, what have you—most of those magazines spawned. Having transformed an elitist little publishing group into a vast press empire whose numerous magazines throbbed with his supple modernist style, my stepfather remained Condé Nast’s driving force for nearly forty years. And he was generally looked upon, as the New York Post put it in its 1999 obituary, as “the father of modern fashion publishing.” “Media World Mourns a Legend,” the New York Post headline declared upon his death, while the International Herald Tribune asserted that in the past century “No man in the West held more power over fashion images.”

  Born in Russia, like my mother, and educated in Great Britain and in France, Alex was a dark-haired, dapper man of very regal bearing, five-feet-eleven in height, who emanated an aura of steely self-discipline. His most memorable features were his trim mustache, his debonair, enigmatic smile, and the trace of British accent he had acquired in the boarding schools of his early adolescence. Suave, peerlessly trilingual, dressed year-round in vestments of almost priestly monotony—dark gray flannel suit and black or navy-blue hand-knit tie most of the year, beige linen in the summer months—within a few years of arriving in New York he had come to epitomize cosmopolitan elegance and aristocratic “European” manners. For forty years he strode the salons of New York and the corridors of Condé Nast’s expanding magazine empire, charming and persuading, carefully honing his inscrutable image, exceptionally skilled at the art of flattery, paying his court to whatever cultural celebrities or society figure could further advance his phenomenal career. Flirtatious but utterly chaste, he became noted for brandishing his adoration of my mother and his unswerving fidelity to her (an exotic aspect of his self-image, which also served, I suspect, to keep the advances of Condé Nast’s mostly female staff at bay). At the office, where he had the final say on everything from captions to covers, where he hired and fired at will and clearly relished his power over others, he could be, in turn, extravagantly generous or icily ruthless.