The Mayakovsky Tapes

by Robert Littell

  Nora: Am I wrong in thinking you took pleasure in disparaging Mayakovsky’s manhood?

  Elly: There’s no denying you were certainly being peevish, Lilya Yuryevna. It’s almost as if you were punishing him for his Bolshoi dancer.…

  Lilya: Of course it’s utter nonsense to think I was punishing him. We each of us led independent lives. We had, with considerable effort, managed to liberate ourselves from the constraints of conventional behavior patterns. And we were honest with one another about our sexual lives—

  Nora: Brutally honest would be more accurate.

  Lilya: Is there a form of honesty other than brutal?

  Elly: Identify this serious new lover of yours, Lilya, with whom you presumably preferred the sex to the seduction.

  Lilya: Ask Nora. I recall her boasting, back during our very first session, that she knew his name, rank, and serial number. I only knew his name—Vitali Primakov—and his rank: He was a general in the Red Army, an authentic hero of our Civil War. My God, you wouldn’t believe how physically strong he was! He could lift a dining room table from the floor, gripping only one of its legs, and raise it above his head. We met at a dinner party in Moscow while he was on home leave. Oh, dear, he was dressed in his splendid general’s uniform at the time with gold epaulets on his deliciously broad shoulders.

  Tatiana: Did you invite him into your bed that very first night?

  Lilya: Absolutely not! A woman must guard against giving the impression that she can be seduced effortlessly. Nothing is more treacherous for the longevity of a romance than seeming to be an easy conquest. No, no, that first night he accompanied me to my door at evening’s end and, tearing his parachutist insignia from a sleeve, offered it to me as a keepsake of our first meeting. (I still have it in a carton somewhere—I suppose I could find it if I made the effort.) When I told Mayakovsky about the general I’d met at dinner and showed him the insignia, he didn’t resist waxing sarcastic, asking me if I had enlisted in a parachutist battalion. I replied that, in a manner of speaking, I had. The Poet read between the lines and clearly didn’t appreciate the text he found there. I will confess I really fell head over heels for Vitali. We slept together the second time I saw him, which was the afternoon of the day following that first encounter. I distanced myself from Mayakovsky because of my general. I eventually divorced my Osya in order to marry him.

  Tatiana: Are you still his wife?

  Lilya: I am his widow. Along with poor Rabinovich, the dentist who repaired Mayakovsky’s teeth, and thousands of others, Vitali was accused of being a Trotskyist and shot in 1937. Yes, my beautiful general was shot dead, executed by the very soldiers he’d devoted his life to defending. My God, that was sixteen years ago. Tempus certainly does fugit. Curiously, I still receive a miserable widow’s pension as if Vitali had been killed in action, which I suppose, in a manner of speaking, he was. Damn, you’ve made me lose the thread of my story again. Ah, yes, I was describing what happened when Vitali came into my life. We burned the candle at both ends—my general jestingly styled it coitus un-interruptus—until the candle ceased to exist, at which point he could no longer put off returning to his post in the Far East. Osip and I, stranded in Moscow and bored stiff with always seeing the same faces, decided we could profit from a breath of fresh air, a new horizon. We applied for exit visas to meet my sister, Elsa, in London. She was there with a new husband, the French writer Louis Aragon. Did you know him, Tatiana?

  Tatiana: I know of him. What I know of him I don’t like. He was one of those French intellectuals who, seeing Soviet Russia from the safe distance of his Parisian apartment, fell for all the Communist propaganda, all the lies, all the deceptions—who didn’t listen when those of us who had lived through the Bolshevik Revolution told them about deportations and executions, about man-induced famine, about labor camps where tens of thousands of slave-prisoners constructed those enormous hydroelectric dams the Soviets are so proud of.

  Nora: With your contact in the CheKa, Lilya, that fellow with the pince-nez glued to his broken nose, unlike Mayakovsky you would have had no trouble acquiring visas for your London escapade.

  Lilya: I shall ignore your rudeness, Nora. Living as we all did in Soviet Russia, everyone pulled the strings they could to get the things they needed to make life more congenial. Nobody could remain morally pure and survive. In our day-to-day lives we were forever identifying—and choosing—the lesser evil. Were you any different when you sucked up to Meyerhold—or should I say when you sucked Meyerhold—for a juicy role in one of his plays?

  Nora: That’s—my God, that’s despicable. I never … I earned the roles awarded to me … holy fuck, you are capable of the most outrageous fabrications—

  Lilya: Calm yourself, Nora. You’re sputtering. Where was I? Yes, England. Volodya was his usual generous self—he offered to pay for our train tickets there and back. Our visas were issued and off we went. And, as my Osya quipped, we left Volodya behind to mind the store.

  Elly: In the end, he mined the store!

  Nora: You left me behind to pick up the pieces of crockery you had shattered. Mayakovsky was a shipwreck. A day after he learned that his visa had been denied, you and your soon-to-be-ex husband by sheer coincidence pocketed your visas and headed off to London Town. That very next day Tanik’s letter reached the Poet announcing she could no longer wait for him to return to Paris and had become engaged to a Frenchman, a Vicomte no less.

  Tatiana: My first husband, Bertrand du Plessix, was a perfect gentleman and an extremely eligible bachelor. He was a diplomat, on home leave from his post in the French embassy in Warsaw. Marrying him was my way of burning bridges, of running from Mayakovsky, of making it impossible for me to spend the rest of my life with this volcano of a poet in the magma of a country run by a despot.

  Nora: Reading the letter that announced your engagement, the blood literally drained from Mayakovsky’s face. Fucking French nobility, I can still hear him raging, they’re all fin de race—they don’t have the foggiest idea how to satisfy a woman in bed. Soon after Mayakovsky had a letter from you, Lilya, posted from London and telling him, no doubt in the interest of brutal honesty, that you planned to divorce Osip and marry your Red Army general. Don’t ask me how but the Poet and I somehow managed to muddle through the glacial winter months, with Mayakovsky—groaning about how it was the Russian winter, and not the vastness of the Russian landmass, that formed Russian character—digging himself deeper into a depression with each passing week. The big love that he needed to survive in Soviet Russia had eluded him.

  Tatiana: But he had you!

  Lilya: Indeed, Osip and I counted ourselves lucky that he had you, Nora. We would never have ventured off to London if you hadn’t been there to take his mind off Tatiana and the love affair in Paris.

  Tatiana: Do I have this right, Lilya? You arranged for your sister to introduce me to the Poet to distract him from Elly and the child he’d fathered with her. After which you hoped Nora would distract him from me? And who, pray tell, would distract him from Nora when he became too involved with her?

  Lilya: Nora’s husband and Nora’s career would distract her from him. So we reasoned. So it turned out.

  Nora: Jesus fuck, you calculated everything, didn’t you? Or should I say almost everything—you overlooked how he loved to gamble. Yes, he certainly had me to distract him from Tanik in Paris. He had me every way a man can have a woman. We experimented with all manner of intercourse—and, to coin an expression, outercourse—but nothing seemed to satiate the son of a bitch. Imagine someone who is unable to quench his thirst no matter how much he drinks and you’ll seize the Mayakovsky who was minding Lilya’s store. Which, I suppose, brings us to April of 1930—to the forty-eight hours the Poet called the foulest two days of his thirty-seven years on earth. You ladies know nothing of this episode. You were all off gallivanting in different parts of the globe. I was an eyewitness, an earwitness. As best as I can put the pieces together in my memory, here is how those two terribl
e days unfolded: They began, during breakfast tea, with a bitter fight over the abortion I’d had the previous week. I made the mistake of telling the Poet about it after the fact, which infuriated him inasmuch as he felt he ought to have had a say in the fate of his child. I told him I had no way of knowing if it was his child that had been aborted, which had the effect of pouring oil on flames. I remember him seething in disbelief, “You’re having a love affair with Mayakovsky and still sleeping with your husband!” I defended myself as best I could. “Look, he doesn’t complain about my sleeping with you, the least you can do is not complain about my continuing to sleep with the man who happens to be my lawful husband?” What seemed perfectly logical to my mind only fed his sense of being the victim of treachery. And that was just the beginning of our tribulations. Mayakovsky spent an entire afternoon warming a bench in the outer waiting room of Gosizdat, the State Publishing House. The timeservers at the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers—dictating who could write what so as to eliminate deviationist literature—were giving him a hard time over publication of a new edition of his long poem 150,000,000. Even if he’d agreed to the cuts they were demanding, they proposed to limit the press run to a ludicrous number. On top of that they were refusing to assign his play Mystery-Bouffe to a theater or permit a new edition of it to go to press. Mayakovsky knew that his rudely irreverent plays lampooning the increasingly rigid Soviet bureaucracy—The Bedbug and The Bathhouse (both directed by Meyerhold, by the way)—had been received with lethal coldness and secured him powerful enemies in literary and publishing circles, but the pettiness of what he called the Soviet philistines, and the smear campaign they orchestrated in the press, drove him up the wall. The secretary who presided over the waiting room made him fill out a form in triplicate stating the purpose of his visit. When he finally was allowed in to see somebody, the somebody turned out to be a junior functionary who had no idea who Mayakovsky was and began the conversation—I’m not making this up—with “Tell me about yourself, Comrade. I see here you list your occupation as poet. Who appointed you poet?”

  “I appointed myself poet.”

  “If you are self-taught, you would do well to list your occupation as teacher instead of poet. Do you compose your poems in the vein favored by Comrade Iosif Stalin, which is Socialist realism?”

  “I compose my poems in the vein favored by Comrade Karl Marx, which is Communist Futurism.”

  “You are not taking this interview seriously. Forgetting vein for a moment, have you written anything that would appeal to the working-class masses and promote the dictatorship of the proletariat?”

  Mayakovsky mentioned his poem “Paris,” where he invites the Eiffel Tower to lead a revolution in France. The young bureaucrat raised an eyebrow. “Ah, that at least sounds like a sensible idea for a poem. Why don’t you show it to me. If I like it I might try to get it published in a regional magazine.”

  “It has already been published, Comrade bureaucrat.”

  “Really! Where?”

  “In Pravda.”

  “Pravda! What did you say your name was?”

  I am reporting the conversation as Mayakovsky related it to me, word for word. The Poet rose to leave. “Tell your masters that the self-taught Poet Mayakovsky came by today to pay his respects to Comrade Lenin and the Revolution his heirs betrayed.” With that, he stalked out.

  Needless to say, the Poet, totally humiliated, crept back to his Love Boat ranting about elitist attitudes that were supposed to disappear in a Communist state.

  Lilya: Christ, it would have taken a lot less than that to bring on one of his black moods.

  Nora: The episode at the State Publishing House was only the half of it. That evening of the following day he had a poetry reading at the Institute of National Economy. As we were due to be at Meyerhold’s for supper immediately afterward, I tagged along with him. Mayakovsky had only just gotten over the grippe, his throat was still sore, but he didn’t want to cancel the reading at the last moment. Bundled into an overcoat with a long scarf wound around his neck—

  Tatiana: Oh, was it dark green and made of wool? It was my going-away gift to him when his visa expired and he was obliged to quit Paris the second time. That and a Waterman fountain pen. He jokingly promised to wear the green scarf when he came to fetch me back to Russia so that I would recognize him when I met his train at the Gare du Nord.

  Nora: There were only twenty or so students in the Plekhanov Auditorium when we arrived but the Poet had too much pride to back out. He climbed onto the narrow dimly lighted stage and treated himself to a swig from a flask filled with cheap Georgian cognac. There was no applause, just a sullen silence. One young man could be heard saying “Get on with it, Granddad. We don’t have all night.” And the Poet—it breaks my heart remembering it—got on with it. He began declaiming his exquisite poem that describes the conversation he had with the sun when it dropped in for tea one summer’s day. The poem had the words govno and blyad in it—

  Litzky: (in English) Shit and whore.

  Lilya: What does he say?

  Elly: He translates govno and blyad into English to show he is familiar with Russian slang.

  Nora: Hearing these words, several of the young girl students in the auditorium began heckling the Poet. One of them called out “Tasteless vulgarity!” Another shouted, “This was supposed to be a poesy reading, not a tutorial on obscenity.” It was excruciating to watch. Breathing noisily through his nostrils to control his rage, Mayakovsky shambled to the edge of the stage and, for the bat of an eye, I thought he intended to leap off of it and attack his hecklers. But he just stood there, his large body hunched into a wrestler’s belligerent crouch, and announced he was bored to tears with poetry readings. As near as I can reconstruct the occasion, he plunged on: “You probably believe all the gossip circulating about me. It’s true that I was the latrine cleaner of the Revolution, producing propaganda posters for the Russian Telegraph Agency that were hung in the windows of stores during the famine years to hide the fact there was no food on the shelves. It’s true that I may have stepped on the throat of my song in the service of a higher moral imperative than poetry, namely revolution. If I put a foot wrong, my intentions were honorable.” By then the students were openly jeering. “Which of the two showed up here today,” a young man shouted, “the washed-up lyric poet or the agitprop professional?” “Is it true what they wrote in Izvestia—that you autograph your books with an American Waterman fountain pen?” a girl demanded. “Soviet pens not good enough for Mayakovsky?” another girl shouted. The Poet appeared stunned. Shouting hoarsely with what was left of his voice, he recited lines from a verse that I had read so often they were committed to memory. It was from his Backbone Flute:

  Often I think

  it would be better

  to punctuate my sentence with a bullet.

  The audience barely heard these ominous words. Turning pitilessly against Mayakovsky, they stomped their feet on the floorboards to drown out his voice. Two or three stood and shouted insults at him. Mayakovsky started down the steps from the stage. Unable to continue, he sat heavily on one step, his chin buried, Tanik will be gratified to hear, in the folds of his dark green woolen scarf. A nervous silence fell over the auditorium. “When I die,” the Poet could be heard saying, his voice muffled and strained, “you will spill your tears on the pages of the book as you read my poems.” “Fat chance,” one of the students sneered. Laughing cruelly, they crowded into the aisle and, playfully pushing the girls in front to make them walk faster, headed for the exit.

  Elly: This is the first I hear of this episode.…

  Nora: It was worse than the famous reading of his at the Bolshoi.

  Elly: What happened at the Bolshoi?

  Nora: He was reading his Ode to Lenin in the presence of Stalin and Molotov. When he remarked the two of them whispering to each other, he abruptly stopped reciting and glowered up at them in the balcony. But the two continued whispering, their heads close togeth
er, oblivious to the abrupt silence in the theater. As we lived in a new Byzantium where every word, every gesture, every glance, every silence betrayed subterranean currents, everyone present noticed and drew the appropriate conclusion: Mayakovsky was visibly out of favor.

  Lilya: He’d been confronted with hostile audiences before but never one as aggressive as the Plekhanov Auditorium students you describe.

  Tatiana: Knowing how sensitive Mayakovsky was, he would have been deeply wounded by the experience.

  Nora: If anything, it set his blood to boiling. I was ready to skip the supper at Meyerhold’s and call it a night but he wouldn’t hear of it. I remember him mumbling “Vsevolod Meyerhold and I argue over a great many things, including how he stages my plays, but at least he knows who I am.” We hailed one of those private taxis—the chauffeurs of state automobiles moonlighted in the evenings—and made our way to Meyerhold’s flat on Sivtsev Vrazhek where, if you remember, the Poet first bludgeoned his way into my life to claim his night of passion. The flat was aswarm with theater people by the time we got there. Empty vodka bottles were heaped in a baby carriage near the door. There was a sit-down supper for sixteen at Meyerhold’s long narrow oaken table. I wound up sitting diagonally across and three seats further down from the Poet. Platters of pirozhki were passed from hand to hand. Mayakovsky polished off several shot glasses of vodka, throwing back his head and swallowing the contents in one gulp. “So will you?” he called to me across the table, raising his voice to be heard over the hubbub. “Will she or won’t she what?” Meyerhold inquired from the head of the table. “Will she come live with me and be my muse?” the Poet said. Suddenly all eyes were on me. “I am already married,” I remarked. “I wasn’t proposing marriage, only museship,” Mayakovsky retorted. I remember shaking my head and saying, “I’m committed to my career as an actress.” “Your career as muse to the Poet Mayakovsky will bring you fame beyond your wildest dreams,” he shot back. “Is he drunk?” Meyerhold’s wife, Zinaida, called from the other end of the table. “I am both stone drunk and cold sober,” Mayakovsky called back. “My poetry must have a muse to inspire it,” he lurched on. “I must have a great love to survive those arrows of outrageous fortune—the line comes from Pasternak’s translation of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.” Meyerhold signaled with a hand for his guests to resume their table talk. “The differences between the two of you are better explored in private communication,” he counseled the Poet.