Alex had his acolytes and his enemies. Fans of “the silver fox,” as he was often called by his colleagues, were spellbound by the Slavic warmth and charm which he could turn on and off like a faucet; by the authority of his eye; and by his prodigally versatile talents: By 1960, Alex, whose ambition in his youth had been to be a painter, had also become an artist and photographer of note. Notwithstanding his chronically frail health, he had worked tirelessly on weekends and holidays on his own art and had exhibited it in New York’s most prestigious galleries and some of the nation’s major museums. His mammoth sculptures of welded steel had, by the 1980s, arisen in scores of public sites throughout the United States. And he had produced one particular book, The Artist in His Studio, which has remained a classic photographic chronicle of twentieth-century French art.
As for Alex’s foes, they could point to his boundless capacity for self-promotion and to the byzantine ruthlessness of his tactics. They knew all too well—sometimes on the basis of bitter experience—that this ambitious polymath’s only loyalty was to his employers rather than to his colleagues or underlings; and that the price of disagreeing with him could be a brusque dismissal, a process with which he never sullied his own hands but assigned to his henchmen. But until my mother’s death, this malefic, saturnine side of Alex was never once revealed to his family. For a half century Alex held true to his public image as a devoted paterfamilias, serving as a slavishly devoted househusband to my fascinating but deliberately helpless mother, who expected all mountains to come to her and declared herself incapable of calling a plumber or rearing her child. Solely attracted, throughout his life, to powerful women, he made it clear that Tatiana was his “goddess” and that his life’s goal was to satisfy her every whim. For half a century, “Superman,” as my mother and I called Alex, had been an equally affectionate, admirable second father to me. From our first months together in the 1940s, it is Alex who had assumed paternal and maternal roles, who with unfailing patience and tenderness dealt with my teachers and braces and report cards, heard out my heartaches, and imposed curfew hours and taboos on teen behavior. Later, it is he who had given me away in marriage, had soothed my tears as a young bride, and had been the most obsessively doting of grandfathers.
Alex in the 1950s as art director of Vogue magazine, photograph by Irving Penn, 1960.
It is this idol of my early youth whom I had to deal with when I began to look for Mayakovsky’s letters to my mother.
Even though my mother, when she died in 1991, after a long illness, had willed me all her Mayakovsky letters and documents, the search for them turned out to be extremely difficult. For Alex, who shortly after Tatiana’s death and to his friends’ total astonishment had married Tatiana’s nurse, declined to give them to me for eight consecutive years. “Can’t you see I’m too sick to think of such things,” he’d say, perpetually falling back on pleas of fatigue or ill health, or “I’m too tired to remember where they are.” He was notorious for shying away from confrontations and for being vicious when he was forced into one. So whether from innate tact or Confucian subservience, I continued meekly to accept his account that the famous Mayakovsky letters were in a barely accessible bank vault or had been misplaced among his office files.
My patience wore down in the summer of 1999. It is then that I received a letter from the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow, informing me that it owned a large archive of letters from my mother to her own mother, Lyubov Nikolaevna Orlova, who had died in 1963, having never left Russia. She had donated them to the museum shortly before her death. Sadly, my grandmother’s side of the correspondence had not survived, but my mother’s letters—which I had never known existed—described her romance with the poet in the last eighteen months of his life; I had an official invitation from the museum to be their guest while I studied their “Tatiana Yakovleva Archive.” But I knew that to make sense of these missives, I must first retrieve and read the Mayakovsky letters my mother had left me in her will. I decided to confront my stepfather one last time and recover a possession that had legally been mine for eight years.
Alex Liberman lay on his bed in his New York apartment on an August afternoon in 1999, eighty-six years old and very ill, so heavily medicated that he seldom remained awake more than a few minutes at a time. He was scheduled to be flown the next day to his other home in Florida, and I asked him one last time: “Alex, dear, could you tell me where the Mayakovsky letters are?” “Oh, somewhere here,” his wasted silvery head lolled in various directions, as if scanning the room. “You should have them.” With these words his eyes closed, and he fell into another deep sleep. I went home to Connecticut, where I’d lived for some decades. But upon the counsel of my husband and of a close friend who was a lawyer I returned to my stepfather’s apartment a few days later and began to look through three-feet-high stacks of envelopes in a corner of his room. After an hour, daunted by the prospect of several days’ work, I took a break. Out of some instinct, I walked over to his bedside table and opened the top drawer. There, in an ancient, half-torn envelope marked “Mayakovsky Letters” in my mother’s large scrawling script, was the inheritance that had eluded me for years: twenty-seven pages of the poet’s letters, twenty-four telegrams, and some original manuscripts of his poems.
Only then, upon reading this correspondence, did I understand why my possessive, jealous stepfather, who had worked hard to create the legend that he was the center of Tatiana’s universe, was determined to deny the poet’s letters to their rightful heir, the adopted daughter he had supposedly cherished. Only then did I know why he was ready literally to defy the law in order to withhold them from the world.
I was to see Alex once more in Florida, two months later, ten days before he died. By then, he was almost beyond speech. As I kissed my stepfather’s forehead one last time, thanking him silently amid my tears for having rescued my childhood, I marveled at his capacity for deceit. I kept on marveling at his deviousness a few months later, as I worked in the archives of the Mayakovsky Museum, finally able, thanks to my recovery of the poet’s letters, to access the treasure of my mother’s past.
It is this Machiavellian man—whose character and early life, like my mother’s, were shaped by the mayhem of the Russian Revolution—whom I must begin to chronicle in the next chapters.
FIVE
Alex and His Father
The suave, urbane Alexander Liberman was the grandson of tenant farmers in the Ukraine. His father, Semyon Isaevich, was born in 1881 in a tiny village of that province to which his forebears had moved a few generations earlier. Unlike many Jewish farmers in Russia, the Lieberman family (the first “e” was dropped by Semyon only much later) had preserved its religious traditions. Semyon’s maternal grandfather, a lanky, bearded man who wore the long robes traditional to Hebrew scholars, cared far more about studying his Talmud than he did about agrarian issues. He was to have an even greater influence on his grandson than Semyon’s practical, bon vivant father, who headed the family’s farming enterprise.
Since Jews were not allowed to own land in prerevolutionary times, the Liebermans rented their property, which consisted of some four thousand acres of sugar-beet fields, from a Polish absentee landlord whom they never once met. Living in a mansion that was part of the estate, however, were the landlord’s spinster sisters, with whom Semyon’s family shared the use of a vast fruit-laden orchard. These ladies liked to stroll by a zigzagging stream lined with weeping willows that adjoined the Liebermans’ dwelling, and members of Semyon’s family approached them with veneration, kissing their hands and letting them kiss the tops of their heads. The Liebermans, in turn, were treated with loving deference by the two hundred villagers who did the actual toiling on the land and to whom they were closely bonded, remaining attentive to their joys and sorrows and responding to their needs. Semyon speaks of his close links to the Russian peasantry as a determining influence in his life: “This early feeling for the peasants was an important factor in my development. It is my love f
or them which in time made me a revolutionary.”
Semyon Lieberman was the only boy in his generation of children. His mother’s family wanted him to follow in the steps of his maternal grandfather and become a full-time scholar. His father wished him to take over his role in supervising the family’s farming business. The scholars’ faction prevailed, and at the age of seven Semyon, who up to then spoke only Ukrainian and Yiddish, was sent away to a larger village to study. There, he learned Russian as well as classical Hebrew and already displayed considerable intellectual gifts. Semyon also found a protector and mentor in the local Orthodox priest, whose two sons, prominent St. Petersburg government officials who often visited their father, much impressed the young man. Their polished manners and the elegance of their dress led Semyon to daydream of eventually leaving the confines of his province. And at the age of sixteen, with five rubles in his pocket, he ran away to a far larger town, Zhitomir, to live with a distant cousin who was a medical doctor and a liberal Reformed rabbi.
Living on next to nothing in his cousin’s home, Semyon studied hard enough to pass the demanding entrance examinations set by the czarist high-school system. Once enrolled, he came under the influence of a particularly beloved teacher who, at the end of each class, silently handed him anticzarist publications printed by underground Marxist groups. Thus the seeds of radicalism were early sown in Semyon’s mind. But his “real baptism as a revolutionary,” as he put it in a memoir he published decades later, Building Lenin’s Russia, occurred during one of the many anti-Jewish pogroms staged by local authorities in the Ukraine. During one particular skirmish, a Cossack’s saber slashed him near the collarbone and nearly blinded him in the right eye. “The memory of [my] first battle with the Czar’s henchmen remained with me forever,” he wrote. That evening, coming to in a hospital cot, he pledged to become a full-fledged revolutionary and help topple the czarist system. “I had come out of that Jewish milieu in which the old traditions of romantic mysticism were still alive…. What I dreamed of was a kingdom of freedom, equality and social justice.”
The Russian university system was as much as closed to Jews. So after finishing high school, Semyon, guided by his egalitarian ideals, set forth for the prestigious University of Vienna, which at the time was a hotbed of social and political radicalism. After earning his way through college by tutoring, he returned to his homeland in 1905, the year massive strikes and nationwide unrest came close to toppling the czarist regime. Once home he immediately joined the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, the major revolutionary group which had recently split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks: Lenin’s Bolsheviks believed in rigid party discipline and looked on the proletariat and the poorest peasantry as potential forces in the next stage of the revolution; the more centrist Mensheviks—with whom Semyon tended to side—sought allies in the liberal anticzarist bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and focused on education and on the formation of labor unions.
Yet while less prone to use violent tactics, Mensheviks in those years could be as aggressive as Bolsheviks. After the abortive revolution of 1905, Semyon returned to his native Ukraine and worked with underground labor unions in Odessa, where a particularly active branch of the Social Democratic Party had formed. He often returned to his native village to evade the authorities that constantly tracked him. But in 1907, after a close shave with the czar’s police in his own hometown, he decided to seek the protective anonymity of a large city and moved to Kiev. It was during his years in Kiev that Semyon found his vocation. While continuing his underground activities, he supported himself by working for a timber-exporting firm. And the romantic vastness, the Olympian scale of the Russian woodlands, which contain more than 60 percent of all the forestlands in Europe and Asia, singularly captured his imagination. Timber had traditionally been the nation’s most lucrative export item, the very bedrock of its economy. And to Semyon’s surprise, the practical aspect of this national treasure—“the commercial side of the sylvan beauty of Russia,” in his own words—entranced him as no other field of study ever had. “I plunged into [the study] of timber areas and sawmill capacities…as I ate and dreamed, as I dressed and walked and talked, my thoughts were with the woods and their output.”
Semyon, who had excelled in mathematics, seems to have had a virtuoso gift for the economics of lumber. While continuing to work with underground socialist groups and acquiring a postgraduate degree from the University of Kiev, he advanced so rapidly in the lumber industry that within a few years he sat on the boards of directors of several major companies. He authored a table of timber calculations that soon came into use throughout the industry, and in 1914 he even became a member of a special commission on timber in the Ministry of Agriculture. By then, romance had come into Semyon’s life. Upon one of his near arrests in Kiev a few years back, he had been sheltered by a Jewish tailor with socialist sympathies who, when the police arrived, pretended that Semyon was his pretty daughter’s tutor. Through this family, Semyon soon met his future wife, a young woman who, as he put it, “was also helping the common cause of the revolution.”
Alexander Liberman’s father, Semyon Liberman, in Paris in the late 1920s.
What we know about the family origins of Semyon’s gifted, flamboyant wife, the mother of his son, Aleksandr, can be gleaned from a barely fictionalized memoir, The Errant Heart, which she wrote in her later years. Genrieta Mironovna—we don’t know her family name, and at some point in her exile she took on the stage name Henriette Pascar—was a voluptuously beautiful aspiring actress who was of part gypsy, part Romanian Jewish origins. (She always preferred to emphasize the gypsy part of her heritage rather than the Jewish one.) The oldest of twenty children, born in 1886 to a wealthy timber heiress in western Romania, she was not given much attention or affection as a child. Her handsome, feckless father—the gypsy—seemed to take great sadistic pleasure in periodically whipping his children. Henriette ran away at the age of seventeen and lived for two years with gypsy cousins in Odessa, where she attended meetings of revolutionary underground organizations, at which, on several occasions, she briefly encountered Semyon Lieberman. After a few years spent in Paris, where she studied French literature at the Sorbonne while supporting herself as a nurse, she returned to Russia in 1911 and lived in Kiev with a married sister, once again taking an active part in revolutionary underground organizations. Like Semyon Lieberman, Henriette was of Menshevik rather than Bolshevik persuasion, and it was through such political activities that she met him again.
When they renewed acquaintance in Kiev in 1911, Henriette, who was then studying acting and stage direction with Vsevolod Meyerhold, found Semyon vastly changed. The innate elegance of this short, fine-featured, bespectacled, courteous young man was now heightened by his penchant for the finest European tailoring, preferably British. As Henriette put it in her memoir, she had remembered “a carelessly dressed Nihilist” and was reintroduced to a highly sophisticated fellow of “distinctly European bearing.” She was immediately taken with the thoughtfulness and assuredness of his manner (“a born leader, whose measured words allay all worries”). Although she found him to be “neurotically proud of his Jewish heritage,” filled with “a blend of idealism inspired by the Talmud,” she was impressed by his strength and integrity of character and recognized in herself “the serene calm that precedes the torment of love.” The infatuation seems to have been mutual, and by 1911 the couple settled together in St. Petersburg, another important center of the lumber industry, from which Semyon now ran his growing empire. Their son, Aleksandr Semyonovich Lieberman, was born three months after they were married, on September 4, 1912, in Kiev. His parents were staying there during one of Semyon’s extended business trips; his birth was officially registered by the chief rabbi of Kiev before the family started home.
Of St. Petersburg, where the Liebermans lived in a six-room apartment just off the Nevsky Prospect, near St. Isaac Church, little Alex—“Shura” or “Shurik” to his family—would remember only one promi
nent detail: His nursery and all its furnishings—bed, bureau, chairs, chest of drawers—were painted white, a great novelty in those years. This had been his mother’s decorating idea, and it was to influence him to the end of his days: For the rest of his life, all of Alex’s habitations, his offices as well as his homes, were painted a stark, blinding white. He also remembers sitting in his parents’ living room and watching his mother reclining on a leopard-skinned divan, having her portrait painted in a gold Fortuny gown. (She encouraged him to squeeze the colors out of the artist’s tubes, which entranced him and let him know, then and there, that his mother wanted him to become a painter.) But otherwise he saw little of his parents, for his mother continued to pursue her theater career and engage in numerous love affairs, and his father’s business trips were often of many weeks’ or months’ duration. Along with his administrative duties on various timber boards and commissions, including the czar’s, Semyon was managing three large estates, which were scattered from the western end of the Russian empire to Siberia: those of Grand Duke Michael, the czar’s brother; Prince Olden-burg, the czar’s uncle; and the legendarily wealthy Prince Balashov, a pillar of czarist society, who owned some 2.7 million acres throughout Russia, including much of the timber areas in the Ural Mountains.
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