The Mayakovsky Tapes

  Elly: By man-induced you surely mean Stalin-induced.

  Nora: The gentleman in question is still alive and, at last report, kicking. There are some t’s that are better left uncrossed, especially for those of us who, unlike Tanik and Elly here, do not live abroad. As I was saying, throughout the year 1929 there were purges in the Party and in our cultural institutions: the Academy of Sciences, the Pushkin House literary institute in Leningrad, the Moscow Art Theatre, the State Academy of Artistic Studies. It was in 1929 that many of us began to keep a small satchel filled with spare stockings and underwear and soap and cigarettes under our beds when we went to sleep in case there were to be a midnight knock on the door.

  Lilya: Mayakovsky—speaking, as Nora says, without moving his lips—was heard to declare that 1929 was a toxic year. The toxin poisoned all of us in one way or another. I’ll give you an example: What was supposed to be just another of our regular Tuesday night literary salons turned into a bitter brouhaha.

  Tatiana: I heard rumors about that evening but no two accounts agreed. Tell us what really happened.

  Lilya: Word had spread that Pasternak, who was known to have a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was finally going to read his translation of the famous act III, scene ii, the so-called Gonzago Play Scene, which I suppose is why we ended up with a full house, standing room only. The Mandelshtams came around, Osip and Nadezhda, the both of them as usual more interested in the female guests than the male. My Osip was there with his lover at the time, her name escapes me. (When he came over to introduce her, her name escaped him, too. But that’s another story.) Mayakovsky was in the kitchen desperately trying to thaw frozen black potatoes on the wood-burning stove so we would have something to offer our guests beside vodka. Pasternak was a regular at our Tuesday salons but this time he showed up with his wife, Yevgenia, the melancholy in her dark eyes obscuring the haunting beauty of her features. Akhmatova, an admirer of the English poet-playwright she called Shake Spear, would have attended if she’d been in Moscow; she sent me a telegram saying she had to deliver the monthly food parcel to the prison where her son, Lev, was being held. Vsevolod Meyerhold, sporting one of his gaudy bow ties, came with his stunningly beautiful wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh. You will surely remember that she’d been the second (though not the last) wife of the late poet Yesenin. Their marriage ended in divorce when Yesenin learned of her very public love affair with Meyerhold.

  Elly: Didn’t Yesenin marry that barefoot American dancer after divorcing Zinaida Raikh?

  Lilya: You have a good memory, Elly. He did, yes. Her name was Isadora something.

  Elly: Not Isadora Duncan?

  Lilya: Duncan, that’s it. Isadora Duncan. She was seventeen years older than Yesenin, he didn’t speak a word of English and she didn’t speak a word of Russian. One wonders how they communicated when they weren’t in a bed. Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t last long.

  Tatiana: Who else was at your famous soiree?

  Lilya: Let me think. Ah, yes, Balanchine turned up with a black ribbon on his lapel—he was still mourning the death of his muse Lidia Ivanova, who drowned in a boating accident several years before. He brought his wife, Tamara Geva, who was dancing in his version of Chopin’s Funeral March at the City Duma hall, which was so drafty audiences sat through performances in their overcoats. Maxim Gorky, looking more worn than I remembered, arrived arm-in-arm with Kazimir Malevich, the painter who was the laughingstock for trying to pass off his black squares as avant-garde art. Oh dear, I almost forgot Osip’s CheKist friend, Comrade Agranov, who was sitting on the floor near the window.

  Nora: He was sitting on Mayakovsky’s orange crate, not on the floor, Lilya Yuryevna. I remember him fidgeting on the crate as if the company he was keeping irritated his anus. It suits you to forget that I was there, too. Let me jog your memory. I arrived on the arm of the Poet Mayakovsky.

  Lilya: I may not have noticed you, Nora dear, because the Poet more often than not showed up with a woman on his arm. I’m afraid, after a time, the women came to resemble one another, which tended to render them invisible. Where was I? Yes, actually the soiree I’m describing began on a hilarious note with Gorky recounting a Central Committee meeting he’d attended. Stalin, of course, had been the keynote speaker. Almost on cue, the three hundred or so in the auditorium had leaped to their feet to interrupt the Great Helmsman with applause and the stamping of feet. Gorky had us all shedding tears of laughter as he described the scene. The applause tended to go on forever because Stalin was thought to have agents in the balconies watching to see who would be the first to stop applauding. With the result that everyone kept applauding until Stalin, tiring of the game and eager to finish the speech in his lifetime, raised his crippled arm, at which point the applause instantly ceased and the delegates and their guests sank back onto their seats waiting for the next applause line. Gorky’s account drew a standing ovation from the thirty or so friends in our flat and they showed no signs of stopping until, in imitation of Stalin, he raised a limp left arm, at which point the applause turned itself off like a water tap. Oh, it was good clean fun. I remember being hopeful Comrade Agranov would see it that way. I certainly encouraged him to appreciate our collective sense of humor when I permitted him into my bed later that night. Remark, only someone as famed as Gorky, both in Russia and abroad, would have dared the anecdote.…

  Tatiana: Why do you hesitate, Lilya Yuryevna.

  Lilya: I hesitate because the good clean fun didn’t last long. I recollect, as if all this had transpired yesterday, a hush settling over the assemblage as Pasternak, his long face more doleful than usual, rose to read. He stood in the doorway, his back to the jamb, so that everyone in the two rooms could hear him, and clearing his throat, declaimed what we expected would be a rendering of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

  A note, please—usual cipher!

  Rainer, are you enjoying the new rhyming?

  For, to explicate the word correctly:

  “rhyme”—what else—conceivably—can—Death be

  but a row of new rhymes?

  When Pasternak reached the last line, his lids seemed to settle of their own weight over his moist eyes, as if to conceal that the lines he’d read had induced tears.

  A shrill female voice I couldn’t immediately identify shattered the silence. “We came to hear Pasternak’s translation of Shakespeare. What you recited was neither Pasternak nor Shakespeare. It is unmistakably Tsvetaeva.”

  A male voice called out, “We are a captive audience to intellectual masturbation!”

  A woman cried, “Tsvetaeva has an audience of one: herself. Her verse lacks the most essential ingredient in poetry: claritas.”

  Pasternak shuddered, as if he were throwing off an encumbrance. “She has an audience of at least two. I understand her. Her soul has become verb. Her heart’s ache has become noun. The poem I read is a love letter to the lover she never met, the majestic poet Rainer Rilke, who had just died. She is desperately trying to get him to describe what comes after death.”

  Pasternak’s wife heaved herself to her feet. “Of course you understand her,” Yevgenia spat out in a harsh whisper that echoed through the rooms. “Your fingers are still ink-stained from copying off her poem last night. Your heart, too, is ink-stained, Borushka. Why not come right out and say it? You are sick with love for Tsvetaeva!”

  Pasternak sighed deeply. “She is my only legitimate heaven and wife,” he said softly.

  I can still hear Yevgenia choking on a manic laugh. “You poor shit, your only legitimate heaven and wife is known to prefer Sappho to Homer.” The laugh broke through to the surface and the tears, as if spilling from a dam, followed. “The father of my children prefers a bird on the wing to one in the hand.” And gagging on sobs that racked her frail body, she fled the flat.

  “You ought to settle your domestic problems in your own home and not contaminate mine with them,” my Osip remarked sourly.

  By now Pasternak was past cari
ng what people thought of his performance. “My poet soul mate Tsvetaeva calls Russia a kind of Beyond. What you say about her poem only proves her point. Russia is Beyond. The artists, the critics in it are Beyond—”

  In my mind’s eye I can still see Mayakovsky, standing in the doorway of our tiny kitchen, clutching a terra-cotta pot filled with thawed potatoes to his chest, exploding in rage. “Of course, to Tsvetaeva—to all those Russian exiles hiding abroad from the future—Russia is beyond. It’s beyond their comprehension, beyond their inspiration, beyond their love of homeland. If you are unable to love your homeland, you are unable to love, period.”

  Pasternak was not about to let this pass without a rejoinder. “Since when have you—with your mistresses scattered around the globe—become such an expert on love, Vladimir Vladimirovich?”

  “I am an expert on Pasternak,” Mayakovsky shot back. “You are taking out on our revolution your botched love affair with Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva. She rejected Russia and then, as everyone knows, she rejected you. A poet cannot live ostrich-like in exile, as she does in Paris, and write coherent poetry.”

  Tatiana: That sounds like something the Mayakovsky I knew would say—he didn’t really like the Russian expatriates he met in Paris, he didn’t see himself abandoning Russia and joining them in exile, even for me.

  Lilya: Damn it, Tatiana, that doesn’t sound like something Mayakovsky would say. It’s something he did say. I happen to have a good ear for the music of spoken dialogue. Words, articulated, reach my ear as if they were notes of music, phrases as if chords, dialogue as if a contrapuntal fugue. That’s how I am able to reproduce what he said—I remember the music of the conversation. I shall give you a for instance: It was just about then in the dialogue between Mayakovsky and Pasternak that the former, elevating his jawbone as if it were a weapon and sighting directly on Pasternak, exclaimed, “You need to have roots in Russian soil to be a Russian poet.”

  I remember, as if all this had transpired yesterday, Pasternak coming off his doorjamb. “Tsvetaeva didn’t reject Russia,” he burst out. “Russia rejected her. It was your darling Bolsheviks, Mayakovsky, who stopped publishing her—”

  Nadezhda Mandelshtam, sounding to my ear like a voice in the wilderness, cried out, “They also stopped publishing Osip Mandelshtam. They haven’t published his poetry since the middle twenties. If Tsvetaeva was an external émigré, Mandelshtam was turned into an internal émigré.”

  Mayakovsky set the thawed potatoes on the floor and waded through the guests toward Pasternak. “Osip Mandelshtam, published or not, did not flee Russia and remains a Russian poet. And a prodigious one at that. The same cannot be said of Tsvetaeva. The Bolsheviks stopped publishing her when she abandoned our revolution, and the Motherland along with it.”

  “Our revolution?” Pasternak sneered.

  “There was a time when it was as much yours as mine, Boris Leonidovich,” Mayakovsky declared.

  Mayakovsky and Pasternak were breathing into each other’s face by now. I remember Pasternak saying something along the lines of “I have given up on the Revolution for which you and I held out so much hope. I have given up trusting Stalin to remedy the chaos that inevitably follows revolution and civil war. You, on the other hand, seem to have given up on nothing. You continue to produce agitprop on command: propaganda slogans, propaganda posters, jingles reminding the proletariat not to spit on the factory floor, propaganda articles for newspapers, propaganda poems like your miserable little 150,000,000 about the workers of the world defeating the lumpen capitalists of the world. I heard that Lenin himself thought it was a pretentious piece of shit. God knows where you get the energy to produce things that lack inspiration. The fundamental problem of the Bolshevik dictatorship that you still fawn over—take your hand off of my chest, Vladimir, and don’t interrupt; rest assured, I am choosing my words deliberately: The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is a charade masking the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party, which in turn masks the dictatorship of the Secretary General of the Party, Iosif Stalin—the fundamental problem, as I was saying, is that the Party’s apparatchiki have become the new establishment, utterly alienated from the working masses they claim to represent.” Nobody who was there will ever forget Pasternak, who could be something of a showman when the occasion inspired theatrics, throwing back his head to bare his white throat as he shouted out a line he’d read the night of that first mano a mano at Poet’s Café on the Arbat a lifetime before:

  All round me drowns in falsehood.

  I still get gooseflesh thinking about the episode. Impossible to forget the vision of Vsevolod Meyerhold, his eyes burning in his drawn face, leaping to his feet. “I associate myself with Pasternak,” he proclaimed. “We are all of us drowning in falsehood.” Impossible to forget Meyerhold’s wife, Zinaida, reaching up and tugging desperately at his sleeve to get him to stop and him angrily shaking her off and plummeting on. “When Lenin died, Stalin turned him into a cult figure, burying him in that wooden crypt on Red Square, removing his brain from his skull and slicing it into thirty-thousand segments, so Pravda reported, the segments stored at the Lenin Institute so that future generations can study the slices of Lenin’s brain and discover the origin of his genius. This ludicrous detail demonstrates how far we’ve strayed from the workers’ revolution, which God knows I once supported with all my heart and soul. Christ almighty, when I think back to the dream we dared to dream—we were going to do away with the state and its parliaments and its bureaucracies and its ersatz tsars, not create new cults to exploit the plebeians.”

  Nora: That, unfortunately, wasn’t the first time—or the last time—that Meyerhold threw discretion to the wind in public. He paid in blood for his outbursts. Your antics in bed notwithstanding, Lilya, Comrade Agranov surely reported his criticism of Stalin to his superiors at the CheKa. Unlike Gorky, Meyerhold didn’t have an international reputation to protect him. As the 1930s drew to a close, his wife, my friend and colleague, the lovely Zinaida, was murdered in their apartment—stabbed to death through her eyes! Meyerhold himself was tortured into confessing he was a Japanese espionage agent and executed in one of the vaults of the Lubyanka.

  Tatiana: How do you know this?

  Elly: How do you not know this?

  Nora: I can personally vouch for Lilya’s version of the episode in her apartment. Her memory of the occasion is mine, to the letter. I remember Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s bitter grievance. I remember Meyerhold’s furious rant. I remember Zinaida tugging desperately at his sleeve. I remember Pasternak remarking that Lenin was a mere mortal who made mistakes. Everyone present understood what was, out of prudence, left unsaid: His greatest mistake had been to permit Stalin to become his successor.

  Elly: It’s nothing short of a miracle that Pasternak was never arrested. What saved him was the letter he published in Pravda when Stalin’s young wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, killed herself. That was back in November of 1932, if memory serves. Everyone remarked Pasternak’s letter—for weeks the Russians in New York talked about little else. On a page filled with stale and obviously insincere condolences, Pasternak had managed an expression of commiseration that rang true. It would not have escaped Stalin’s attention, starved as he was for human contact in his Kremlin fishbowl.

  Tatiana: Do you remember what Pasternak wrote, Elly?

  Nora: I remember. I recollect the whole episode. We were drinking champagne backstage at the Bolshoi after a performance of Balanchine’s Don Quixote when someone switched on a radio and we heard the bulletin: Stalin’s young wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, had died of complications from appendicitis, so the official version went. There was, of course, no mention of suicide, though one of the Bolshoi dancers had a half sister who was married to the brother of Stalin’s housekeeper Carolina Til, and it wasn’t long before rumors began to fly. Iosif Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva had had a very bitter and very public row during the boisterous Kremlin banquet marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin
, more than a bit tight, had raised his glass to toast the destruction of our enemies. Nadezhda, furious at her husband for flirting with the film actress seated next to him, refused to raise her glass. Exasperated, Stalin flung orange peel across the table at her. Nadezhda, humiliated in front of the Bolshevik mandarins and their wives, stalked from the banquet hall. The next morning the housekeeper, this Carolina Til, found her lying in a pool of blood on the carpet in her bedroom on the second floor of the Poteshny Palace in the Kremlin compound, a small caliber German pistol in her hand, a small bullet hole in her chest. The vozhd, Russia’s supreme leader, was said to be inconsolable, which is why the avalanche of telegrams and letters of consolation fell on deaf ears. Except Pasternak’s. I will never forget Meyerhold gathering us all during a rehearsal in his theater and, barely mastering his own emotions, reading Pasternak’s letter aloud. It was along the lines of: Hearing the news, I thought, as a poet, deeply and intensively about Stalin for the first time. I was shaken, as though I had been there, living by Stalin’s side, and had seen it. Boris Pasternak.

  Litzky: (in English) Smart move on Pasternak’s part, if you ask me.

  Elly: (in English) Nobody asked you! Beside which, you interpret his remark from your typically perverted American perspective, Rasputin. You assume Pasternak’s condolence was self-serving. When you have been in Moscow longer and know us better, you will come to understand: when the subject is life after death, Russians will say the first thing that comes into their heads. When the subject is life as a death sentence, they are not able to dissemble—they speak from the gut.

  Nora: What the fuck does Rasputin say?

  Elly: (to the ladies, in Russian) He asks if we’ve heard the rumor in Moscow that Pasternak is at work on a novel about the Bolshevik Revolution.

  Tatiana: My God, a novel about the Revolution by the poet Pasternak—it could trigger a counterrevolution!