I am too small for my self.
Somebody keeps wanting to break out of me.
Nora: Listen, the leitmotif—perhaps I should say the laughter that can be taken for choking—runs through his films also. He was working on one at the time of his murder. It was the treatment I found in his Day Book, the one he called The Mousetrap: A Comedy with Suicide. I remember being disconcerted by the title, not to mention the text.
Elly: A pity he never got around to explicating the script for you.
Nora: In a sense, he did. It wasn’t art imitating life, it was art foreshadowing life. Or perhaps I should say foreshadowing death. The Poet tried to make light of it, to pass it off as a spoof, but the treatment was pure Mayakovsky, which is to say it cut to the bone. The inferences I drew from it frightened the shit out of me. Oh fuck, I am hard put, sitting in this hotel room with you ladies in the year 1953, to be sure which came first: Mayakovsky’s Mousetrap or the murder of the Poet. Was I living the Russian roulette episode that put an end to his life—or acting out the role assigned to me in his reckless script?
Elly: Can we read this Mousetrap?
Nora: I don’t know what became of it.
Lilya: I never heard of this Mousetrap of his. But for as far back as I can remember, he toyed with the idea of killing himself the way the tongue toys with a loose tooth—it gave him a certain aching pleasure. The Poet was a tragedy waiting to happen—the first play he ever wrote was entitled Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. Lord knows I never dreamed he’d go through with it. Listen, at the end of the day I prefer to think it was Chort who pushed the Poet over the edge into suicide, not one of us.
Nora: You may be right.… Don’t look at me that way. She may be right.
Litzky: (in English, to Elly) Who the hell is this Chort she keeps talking about?
Elly: (in English, to Litzky) Chort, with his pig’s face and bull’s horns, is a demon. All Russians, whether they admit it or not, live in fear of him.
Tatiana: I understood what you said, Elly. I for one don’t.
Lilya: Maybe you’ll think again when you hear this: Just before Osip and I left for the train station and London, Mayakovsky whispered to me that his brain and his trigger finger—his trigger finger!—had been possessed by a demon. When he said this, oh Christ, I didn’t pay much attention. I thought he was making it up to scare me into canceling the trip. Given what happened while I was away, I’m having second thoughts. Maybe he was possessed by a demon. Perhaps Chort, and not Mayakovsky, was the author of those obscene words buried in one of his poems:
The heart yearns for a bullet
the throat craves a razor
Tatiana: We are no longer in the Middle Ages. So please don’t pretend you believe in the existence of demons, Lilya. Next thing we know you’ll want to burn one at the stake.
Lilya: I do believe in demons. Absolutely. I lived with one for years. I live in fear of Chort even now. If he did in fact talk the Poet into murdering himself, it is entirely possible the demon may have done it in order to seduce me. I could well be his next victim.…
Tatiana: You’re mad, you know. She’s mad as a hatter, isn’t she? For God’s sake, tell her she’s mad!
Elly: If Lilya is mad, so was Dostoevsky. He believed in demons—he wrote a novel called Demons, where the revolutionist, his character Shigalev, plots to overthrow the old order and unleash state terrorism to enslave ninety percent of the population. Which, when you think of it, is exactly what the accursed Bolsheviks did.
Nora: I was only a girl when I read Demons but I remember being frightened by Dostoevsky’s vision of what revolution in Russia would look like. When Meyerhold had consumed enough alcohol to loosen his tongue, he would refer to Stalin’s brutal purges as Shigalevism.
Elly: We’ll never know who or what drove the Poet to murder himself, will we?
Lilya: (standing) Enough for one day. My throat is sore from talking. My heart is sore from remembering. I invite you all down to the hotel bar. I’m told the Metropol stocks French champagne. It would appear we have something to celebrate—the death of our present-day Shigalev, I. Stalin—and something to lament: the murder of V. Mayakovsky. We shall raise our glasses to the late and very lamented Vladimir Vladimirovich, the revolutionist, the idealist, the Quixote in rusted armor charging windmills, the poet, the playwright, the lover—
Nora:—the cunt, the prick!
Elly: (laughing) Admit it, Nora, you loved him despite his being a cunt and a prick.
Lilya: Yes, you need to climb off your high horse and admit you loved him, your byzantine relationship with the homo poeticus notwithstanding.
Nora: I certainly do not admit it! I didn’t love him. Not yet, at any rate. I might have fallen in love with the cunt, the prick if he had been—oh Jesus, if he had been less of a Goddamn homo poeticus and more of a simple homo erectus. Look, I’m sorry to disappoint you. But it’s not easy to love the murderer who commends you—condemns you!—to the tender loving care of a Comrade Government that has gone berserk, murdering millions, and for what? To make the world safer for the murderers!
Lilya: Surely, ladies, we can distinguish a common denominator—we were all of us, at one moment in our lives, sucked into Mayakovsky’s web, spun with love and lust and poetry and plays and films and idealism and revolution. And on that rancid note, what do you say we head down to the bar? I for one am completely dehydrated and desperately in need of drink.
Elly: (in English, to Litzky) When you finish up here, Rasputin, come join us downstairs. You can practice your Russian and I can practice my English.
Litzky: (in English) Okay, sure, why not? (exeunt the four women. Litzky checks to see that they are gone, then leans over the microphone and talks into it sotto voce) Here’s the thing: My name’s not Rasputin. I made that up. It slipped out before I knew what I was saying. I mean, these Russian ladies, they were so uptight, so sober, so serious, I thought it would loosen them up, get a laugh out of them. But they didn’t laugh, did they? Trying to get a laugh out of them had a lot in common with pulling teeth.
As a name, Rasputin is funky. I plan to keep using it while I’m here in Soviet Russia. Shake up the natives, so to speak. My real name, the name my mother gave me, is Robespierre Litzky, after Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, the incorruptible architect of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, cutting off heads until the citizens whose heads were next in line to be cut off cut off his. With hindsight, I can see that I came up with Rasputin in the hope the ladies would notice me. Holy shit, they talked about the most intimate things imaginable as if I wasn’t in the room! Maybe they thought, what with the headphones over my ears and my eyes glued to the volume dial, that I didn’t hear a word they said, that I didn’t know Russian well enough to understand the words they said. Oh, I heard all right, and I understood every last word—even if, like Tatiana, I didn’t quite grasp exactly what over-the-edge described.
I must make a note to ask my Russian girlfriend.
Speaking of Tatiana, she was, to my way of thinking, the best looker of the four, a real cupcake, tall and lean with a terrific figure and silky blonde hair set in waves that broke when they reached the nape of her long swan’s neck. Her lips were thick and painted bright red, her mouth was small, which is said to be an advantage for fellatio. She had a way of crossing and recrossing her thighs with a rustle of silk. The other ladies kept referring to her as innocent but to my mind she was anything but. Her so-called innocence was her way of provoking. She knew how to inflame men. She must have inflamed Mayakovsky in Paris, how else can you explain his readiness to marry her without first sampling the merchandise? He must have inflamed her, too. He was obviously the love of her life. (During one of our breaks, Elly told me that Tatiana’s French husband, one Bertrand du something-or-other, died a hero’s death in the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call World War Two.) I think, listening to Tatiana talk about Mayakovsky, that a part of her regretted she hadn’t adjusted her heart to his hope, ha
dn’t taken him up on his proposal of museship and marriage, hadn’t gone back to Moscow with him to help him grow old gracefully.
Lilya, on the other hand, has the best claim on his legacy. If he has a legacy, it’s thanks to her. At the time of Mayakovsky’s passing, his reputation was stuck in Russia’s cultural quicksand. His poetry, his plays were no longer being published, the Party’s tsars had him on their excuse-the-expression shit list because he made no bones about being fed up with Soviet Russia’s top-heavy bureaucracy, with the way the Revolution was playing out. Holy Christ, Comrade Government wouldn’t even give him permission to leave the country! There was a whole generation of young Russians who had never heard of a poet named Mayakovsky. Lilya changed all that when she managed to get a letter into Comrade Stalin’s hot hands complaining that her one-time lover was being snubbed by the Party mandarins in the literary community. The story is legendary here in Soviet Russia. Stalin is supposed to have scribbled in the margin of Lilya’s letter something along the lines of Mayakovsky was the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his work is a crime. Brik’s complaints are justified. Stalin’s comment appeared in Pravda the next day. The rest is history. Overnight, Mayakovsky’s poetry turned up in print runs that made him the envy of his contemporaries, his plays were sold out in theaters across the country. He became required reading in schools, millions of children had to memorize his poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. (Pasternak, more than a bit envious, was heard to say that Stalin’s praise pushed Soviet schools to plant Mayakovsky-like potatoes during the reign of Catherine the Great.) They named a square, a theater, and a metro station after Mayakovsky here in Moscow, they named an entire town after him in Armenia. (I keep meaning to look on a map and find Armenia.) They even named a steamship after him. Unfortunately it sank in Riga three years ago but as Lilya likes to say, that’s another story. When I take my Russian girlfriend to the Peking Hotel off Mayakovsky Square to eat Chinese food, we always salute the enormous statue of the brooding poet, with the wind billowing his bronze trousers. My girlfriend swears she has seen Mayakovsky wink back at her.
It’s true that from time to time during the recording sessions I couldn’t resist slipping in a word or two. I wasn’t so much carried away as turned on. Where I come from, which is Brooklyn, New York, USA, you don’t get to hear raunchy ladies talk about their sex lives every day of the week.
I sure got an earful: Mouth-to-penis resuscitation!
I suppose I need to say how I came to be recording these conversations. Lilya Yuryevna—she is known as Vladimir Mayakovsky’s widow even though they never married—had been invited to read Mayakovsky’s poems in the university auditorium. A hundred or so students turned up (half of them because they wanted to impress their professors, the other half because coffee and raisin cupcakes were on the house). I recorded Lilya reading Mayakovsky’s Cloud in Trousers (which, remember, was written for one of the Poet’s earlier lovers but then dedicated to her), and assorted other of his poems, with my trusty Peirce Magnetic Wire Recorder. Afterward another lady came over to ask me how my dictaphone worked. She told me her name was Elly something-or-other. She’d heard I was American and, not knowing I was more or less fluent in Russian, spoke to me in English. (I was more than a little flummoxed to find myself face-to-face with a Russian lady who spoke English almost as well as yours truly; when I complimented her she told me that she’d lived in New York for more than thirty years, which certainly explained it.) I played back the wire with Lilya’s voice on it, it was a bit tinny but perfectly understandable. And Elly said, Look, I’m meeting with Lilya and two other ladies later this week in a hotel in downtown Moscow to reminisce about the Poet Mayakovsky, whom we all knew quite well. Would you be willing to record our conversation on your contraption and then transcribe it so we can have a written record? We’d pay you, of course. In U.S. dollars if you prefer. And I said, Hey, rubles will work for me. Which is how my precious Peirce and I came to be in the room when these sundry lovers of the Poet unsheathed their verbal icicles and went for the jugulars of their erstwhile rivals.
A word on the ladies in question: They were totally absorbed in themselves, hostages to their various versions of Mayakovsky. There were times when it didn’t seem as if they were describing the same Poet, much less the same male of the species. For Lilya, he was this erratically moody, deliciously raunchy, exuberant man-poet who couldn’t keep his fly front buttoned in the presence of beautiful women, which didn’t faze her inasmuch as it permitted her to explore the fly fronts of good-looking men who caught her eye. For Tatiana, he was this wounded suitor who, betrayed by previous lovers, betrayed by the Revolution that stifled his poetic gift, was aching to start his love life from scratch. For Elly, he was the one-night stand that lasted eight weeks, at which point, if you swallow her version, Lilya tugged on his leash and pulled him back to Soviet Russia. For the foul-mouthed Nora (the lady I liked best, by the way), he was this mesmerizing man-child stuck in the rut of puberty—though it will not have escaped notice that, her qualms notwithstanding, she enjoyed the banquet and kept coming back for seconds, if you follow my meaning.
I suppose I need to excuse-the-pun bite the bullet, which brings me to the question of that last Russian roulette episode. In her heart of hearts, each of the ladies seemed to take it for granted that Mayakovsky killed himself because of her. For what it’s worth, I’ll record my gut feeling. I am, after all, a student of Russian poetry. My senior thesis, which I’m working on when I’m not recording remembrances of things past for the Poet’s assorted lovers, explores the death and life of V. Mayakovsky. I’ll sure have some juicy firsthand particulars to add to it when I transcribe these Magnetic Wire Recorder conversations. You’ll get a buzz out of my working title: Portrait of the prick who stepped on the throat of his muse. It makes up in precision what it loses in elegance, though I’ll have to clean it up to have a hope in hell of slipping it past my thesis supervisor, a cultural warhorse who has little sense of history and less sense of humor. Truth is, I don’t know if Mayakovsky actually spun the cylinder of that revolver of his or, with malice aforethought, lined up the bullet under the firing pin. Either way the result was the same: A snub-nosed foreign object lodged itself in the muscle known as the heart. But I honestly don’t think he did what he did because his poetic juices were running dry—if you read his opus you’ll see he had a lot of juice left in him. I don’t for an instant buy into Lilya’s fairy tale about the evil demon Chort, with his pig’s face and bull’s horns, taking possession of the Poet’s brain and trigger finger—I don’t believe in Father Frost distributing Christmas presents to Russian children either. Hey, it wasn’t about the Poet being washed up with younger Russians—Mayakovsky was shrewd enough to understand that the reputation of a poet tends to be cyclical, one year you’re destiny’s darling, the next you’re an artifact of a barely remembered past. And it certainly wasn’t the result of a delinquent erection or two—if all the men with delinquent erections shot themselves in the heart we’d be dealing with mass murder. Sure, Pasternak’s slur—that phrase about Mayakovsky stepping on the throat of his song—must have stung the Poet. But oh my God, he wasn’t ashamed of his poster art, though he began to have qualms about the use the Bolsheviks made of it. (I happen to have a collection of his posters—they are certainly original, not to mention striking in a futuristic abstract way.) And he was genuinely proud of his little films, which were pioneering pearls made when motion pictures were in their infancy. Okay, the Revolution going wrong obviously gave him heartburn, but he was savvy enough to hope it would go right once the Kremlin mountaineer (Mandelshtam’s legendary description of Stalin) no longer straddled the pinnacle of the Bolshevik pyramid. No, no, in my humble opinion Mayakovsky murdered himself—Russian roulette definitely qualifies, to borrow Hamlet’s charming phrase, as self-slaughter—because without a muse to slow time down, hey, he just couldn’t deal with growing old. To put a fine point on it, he couldn’t live with the fear of death.
>
Weird, huh? Murdering yourself because you’re terrified to die!
Okay, all I ask is: Think about it.
POSTLUDE
The Mousetrap: A Comedy with Suicide
From V. Mayakovsky’s Day Book: a spoof of his friend B. Pasternak’s translation of the Dumb Show that precedes the Gonzago Play Scene, act III, scene ii, in W. Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. The Dumb Show mimes the plot of the Gonzago Play, which tells the story of the murder of Gonzago, the Duke of Vienna, by a nephew, Lucianus, who then courts and marries Gonzago’s widow, Baptista, and crowns himself king. The Gonzago Play, in turns, parallels the story that the prince, Hamlet, heard from the ghost of his dead father, the King of Denmark, one night on the ramparts of the royal castle, Elsinore: that his uncle, Claudius, had assassinated his father, and then, adding insult to murder, ere the salt of [her] most unrighteous tears had dried married the dead king’s widow, Hamlet’s mother, and crowned himself King of Denmark. As Hamlet himself calls the Gonzago Play “The Mousetrap,” Mayakovsky used that for the title of his spoof, which he might have turned into a short film had he lived.
The Mousetrap: A Comedy with Suicide
A film by V. Mayakovsky
Inspired by W. Shakespeare’s Dumb Show
Moscow. The Great Hall in the Kremlin.
The Dramatis personae attending the Dumb Show:
the King, Mayakovsky
his Queen, Lady Brik
her courtiers, V. Primakov
A. Krasnoshchokov,
L. Kuleshov
her rivals for the affection of the King: Veronica Vitoldovna
Tatiana Yakovleva
Elisabeta Petrovna
Also present:
Court Jew B. Pasternak
Court Jester O. Brik and his Mousy Lady N. Bryukhanenko
Constable Y. Agranov
Politburo Lords and Ladies
Kremlin Guards carrying torches.
The Mayakovsky Tapes Page 17
