Nora: Jesus, Elly, stop distracting Rasputin and let him change the fucking wire.
INTERLUDE
Case File No. Я 23373
The legend, stamped in thick black lettering on the blue cardboard binder, reads: “MOST SECRET: COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY CASE FILE NO. Я 23373.” On the cover page of the dossier inside the binder a name appears in typescript: MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH. The cover page bears the signature, in green ink, of Mikhail Frinovsky, adjunct chief of the Fifth Department of the Second Chief Directorate, OGPU. It has been countersigned, in brown ink, by the man known as “Stalin’s hangman,” Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky, chief, OGPU. There is a check mark, in orange ink, on the upper right-hand corner of the page, and the initials “NI,” clearly the signature of Menzhinsky’s superior in the chain of command, Nikolaï Iejov, Commissar, Ministry of Interior, USSR. There is no evidence that Stalin himself ever read the OGPU file on Mayakovsky, though its conclusion and recommendation were likely passed on to him verbally by Commissar Iejov during one of their regular weekly meetings.
The preamble on the first page of the dossier:
Pursuant to cipher telegram 3126, dated 27 December 1927, M. Frinovski, adjunct chief of the Fifth Department of the Second Chief Directorate, OGPU, was instructed to investigate the zaiavlenie concerning the poet-playwright-activist Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich. In accordance with standing instructions from the Centre regarding denunciations of prominent cultural and intellectual personalities, Mayakovsky was not interrogated personally. Three OGPU agents, experienced in dealing with intellectual deviationists, industrial saboteurs, right-Trotskyist terrorists, Zionists, monarchists, Mensheviks, kulaks, White Russian guardists, and other anti-Soviet elements, were assigned to investigate Mayakovsky. Their report is attached.
Mayakovsky, V.V.
b. 19 July 1893 in Baghdati, Kutaisi Governorate, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire.
Father: Vladimir Konstantinovich, a Zaporozhian Cossack, forester, descended from minor nobility. No trace of proletarian roots.
Mother: Alexandra Alexeyevna, née Pavlenko, housewife of Ukrainian ancestry, third daughter in a bourgeois family of teachers and accountants. No trace of proletarian roots.
V. Mayakovsky has two sisters: Olga Vladimirovna and Ludmila Vladimirovna. No OGPU file exists on either.
Language affiliation: Russian and Georgian.
At age 13, subject attended Kutais Gymnasium where he took part in Socialist demonstrations. He was suspected of stealing two of his father’s shotguns to give to local anarchists. In the absence of proof, no charges were filed.
Father died 1906 from blood poisoning after pricking his finger sewing book bindings with a rusty needle.
On death of father, subject’s mother moved with Mayakovsky and his two sisters to Moscow where she earned money for food by letting rooms to students. The lodgers turned out to be young Marxists who belonged to the Bolshevik Party. One of the lodgers was arrested and executed for anti-tsarist activities, a second killed himself to avoid arrest. The young Mayakovsky’s interest in Marx and the Bolshevik cause can be said to date to the influence of the student lodgers his mother took in.
In Moscow, subject attended School No. 5 but switched to Stroganov School of Industrial Arts because his mother was unable to pay gymnasium tuition.
During Stroganov years, subject joined Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and, under the nom de guerre of Comrade Konstantin, worked as activist, attending indoctrination meetings, distributing propaganda leaflets, assisting in field trips to factories to recruit workers. He was involved in plot to smuggle female activists out of Novinsky Prison and sentenced, at 16, to Butyrka prison for a year, most of it spent in solitary confinement for riotous behavior, insubordination toward the warden and guards, and inciting other prisoners to disobedience. He has said that he began writing poetry in prison. On his release the copybook containing his poetry was confiscated by the warden and burned. A notation on his prison record states that he was not deported to Siberia because of his young age.
Upon release from prison in 1910, subject quit the Bolshevik Party, for reasons unexplained. He never reapplied for membership, for reasons unexplained.
During the Patriotic War of 1914, subject became active with group of self-styled Futurist artists/poets. He read poems on street corners, later performed in cafés in Moscow and Petrograd. With other Futurist poets subject toured 17 provincial cities, during which they were reported to spend more time drinking vodka and chasing girls than reading poetry to crowds. Local police were forced to suspend several poetry readings after riots broke out, for reasons unexplained.
In 1916 subject, being the only son of a widow, was at first exempt from the draft but, with the war dragging on, he was eventually conscripted into the army and served for a year in a Petrograd motor brigade. His period of service was cut short when the military authorities learned he had been in prison for Marxist activities. The possibility that Mayakovsky denounced himself in order to be released from military service cannot be excluded.
In 1917 the subject openly embraced our Bolshevik Revolution. He created agitprop posters during the Civil War period promoting the state-run store Mosselprom. He worked for a time in Smolny Institute in Petrograd, Bolshevik h.q. before Lenin moved the capital to Moscow. Mayakovsky’s 3,000-line elegy Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, composed on the death of our esteemed leader in 1924, appears to have been written by someone with a strong admiration for Lenin. The possibility that subject was personally acquainted with V. Lenin cannot be excluded inasmuch as Comrade Lenin was known to occasionally take his meals in the Smolny canteen with young activists.
After Bolshevik Revolution subject openly defined his work as “Communist Futurism.” The term remains unexplained and clearly has no relation to the Party’s preferred formulation of “Socialist Realism.”
The subject’s personal life was, to put it mildly, chaotic. At the time of the Revolution he was living with a married couple, the literary critic Osip Maksimovich Brik and his wife Lili Yuryevna Brik, née Kagan. Both the Briks are Israelites. For a short period after the Revolution, Osip Brik worked as a Legal Counsel for our CheKa but was fired because of a “negligent attitude.” Mayakovsky made no secret of being Lili Brik’s lover. The Brik woman, her husband Osip, and Mayakovsky were known to have numerous sexual liaisons outside their ménage à trois.
Starting in the early 1920s the subject’s relationship with Soviet authorities began to deteriorate. He became increasingly critical of the Soviet system, at one point publicly denouncing V. Lenin’s New Economic Policy formulation of “Two steps forward, one step back.” On several occasions Mayakovsky openly defied the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, A. V. Lunacharsky, over Soviet censorship and the Party’s preference for Socialist Realism as the guiding esthetic principal for artists and writers.
In 1925 the subject openly defied the Party when he publicly attributed the suicide of his friend, the hooligan-poet S. Yesenin, to disillusionment with the Communist Party’s direction of the Soviet Union and not alcohol and drugs, the official explanation provided by the Party.
Beginning in the 1920s, subject’s published works began to be openly critical of the Soviet system, which explains why fewer of his works were published and the works that were published were allocated smaller press runs. His 1926 “Talking With the Tax Collector About Poetry” is an example of his being estranged from the Party line. An excerpt:
Excuse the interruption,
Citizen tax collector!
I’m desperate for an answer
to a burning question:
What is the role
of the poet
in a worker’s paradise?
Clearly, Mayakovsky’s narcissistic opinion concerning the role of the poet in a proletarian state does not conform to the Party’s more mature view.
Conclusion:
We are dealing, in Mayakovsky’s
case, with a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution and an activist who worked to promote the Soviet system in the years immediately following the Revolution. But Mayakovsky, displaying a regrettable lack of discipline, class consciousness, and burdened with a muddled ideology that rendered him oblivious to honest criticism, has strayed from the Party and its cultural line as he grew older. Traveling as he did, in the mid and late 1920s, to the United States of North America and France can be said to have contaminated him, most especially because of love affairs in New York City and Paris with openly anti-Bolshevik White Russian elements who had emigrated from the Soviet Union after the Revolution. Furthermore, he is known to be a close friend of the poet I. Stalin has described as the cloud dweller (i.e., detached from Soviet reality), B. Pasternak, who in turn has close ties with M. Tsvetaeva, an anti-Soviet émigré poet living in Paris, and A. Akhmatova, an anti-Soviet poet whose ex-husband Nikolai Gumilev was executed for treason and whose son, Lev, is now in prison for anti-Soviet activities. As far as Mayakovsky is concerned, there is so far no evidence of Trotskyist ties or overt counterrevolutionary activities, though he is rumored to be working on stage plays that mimic the virulent and malicious anti-Soviet propaganda of the USSR’s capitalist enemies. As for his oeuvre, Mayakovsky’s subject matter can be said to be systematically nombrilistic: He is an opportunist who writes for the most part about himself (a “self-advertiser,” in the words of one critic), with themes based on decadent erotic motifs linked with motifs of death, mourning, melancholy, and mysticism. Like the decadent poets M. Tsvetaeva and A. Akhmatova, Mayakovsky composes poems and plays and films that reek of intellectual masturbation.
Recommendation:
Mayakovsky is known to be popular in the Motherland with people of his generation and enjoys an international reputation of sorts, which makes dealing with him extremely delicate. His arrest, even an interrogation, would attract unfavorable international attention. A trial before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, USSR, and an eventual sentence of execution or even prison would become a cause célèbre that could seriously weaken Soviet influence in the Communist parties of Western Europe. A member of the OGPU, Comrade Agranov, has managed to infiltrate Mayakovsky’s circle and become intimate with Lili Brik, Mayakovsky’s concubine in the early 1920s who remains his close confident and friend. We thus have eyes and ears in a position to detect treason if and when it should raise its ugly head.
Therefore, no immediate action is contemplated other than to place Mayakovsky on the permanent Watch List of potential Enemies of the People (along with B. Pasternak, O. Mandelshtam, M. Tsvetaeva, and A. Akhmatova) and closely monitor his activities to establish how often and how far he strays from the Party’s fold. It is unlikely that Mayakovsky’s reputation or his oeuvre will survive his death that, if need arises, can always be hastened. Commissar Iejov has only to say the word and we will shorten V. Mayakovsky by a head.
Lubyanka Square, Moscow
This 16th day of January 1928
E. A. Match
V. I. Chigaliev
P. A. Iakovlev
FOURTH SESSION
The good clean fun didn’t last long.…
Litzky: (in English) Ladies, what say we put this show back on the road.
Nora: I caught the gist of that. It would appear that our Rasputin is eager to leave Mother Russia.
Lilya: He’s fixed the headset over his ears again. He must be ready to begin the next session.
Tatiana: I’ll start this off: I’m curious to know if Mayakovsky and Pasternak remained friends after that famous mano a mano in the Poet’s Café on the Arbat.
Lilya: For the longest time, which is to say through most of the 1920s, they were quite close. Mourning the death of poets brought them even closer—Nikolai Gumilev’s execution in 1921, Sergei Yesenin’s suicide in 1925.
Elly: Oh my God, the Poet was still grieving for our national treasure Yesenin when I knew him in New York. With tears brimming in his eyes, he would recount the suicide over and over, as if it were a refrain at the end of a verse. He seemed obsessed by the grisly details. According to Mayakovsky, Sergei cut his wrists and wrote a farewell note in his own blood because he had no inkwell handy. Goodbye my friend, let’s have no sadness, there’s nothing new in dying. And then he hanged himself from heating pipes of his room in the Hôtel Angleterre in Leningrad. It sticks in my mind that Mayakovsky was very bitter when the Bolsheviks attributed the suicide to alcohol and drugs. He was persuaded that Yesenin abused alcohol and drugs because he was terribly disheartened by the Bolshevik’s abuse of their revolutionary ideals. Jesus, he was only thirty years old at the time of his death.…
Lilya: Yes, yes, that’s my memory, too. The Poet was haunted by the suicide of Yesenin. When he got back from New York—when he got back from his tryst with you, Elly—
Elly: Tryst! Thank you for that, Lilya Yuryevna. We may have had only eight weeks together but for the both of us it was a love affair, not a tryst.
Lilya: As I was saying, when he returned home, the very next day he dragged me across Moscow to the Vagankovskoye Cemetery to lay some papier-mâché tulips on Sergei’s grave. There were two young women there when we arrived. One was sobbing on the headstone while the other read out, in a voice choking with emotion, Yesenin’s haunting Confessions of a Hooligan. Back at our flat, the Poet and I set about polishing off one of the liter-and-a-half bottles of Polish vodka Osip had brought back from Warsaw, clanking glasses and toasting Sergei’s memory each time we refilled our kitchen tumblers. And I remember Mayakovsky, with one foot into inebriation, wondering if Stendhal had been right after all when he suggested we don’t see things we love as they are but rather as we would like them to be. In Stendhal’s metaphor, you’ll remember, diamond-like salt crystals had transformed a leafless branch of hornbeam into a dazzling phantasm of perfection. Was Mayakovsky applying Stendhal’s metaphor to the way he saw me? God forbid! I preferred to think he might be applying the metaphor to Lenin’s Revolution, which at first had seemed to us to be a phantasm of perfection, and I made the mistake of asking him if this were the case. Stripped of its diamond-like salt crystals, I remarked, thinking out loud, was it just another garden-variety riot that we chose to see as a noble mutiny of the working masses? I seem to remember the Poet muttering something about my having missed his point entirely—but then he fell into a silence so moody it convinced me I had understood him only too well. Alas. Long about his sixth or seventh tumbler of vodka, the Poet came back to Yesenin, wondering aloud if young women would one day drench Mayakovsky’s gravestone with tears; wondering whether his poetic voice would resonate over the heads of Party functionaries spouting Party lines after his death; wondering if his assorted lovers would one day meet in a hotel room to reminisce about V. Mayakovsky, trying to figure out if he was diamond or hornbeam.
Elly: And here we are.
Tatiana: I vote diamond.
Nora: I vote hornbeam.
Lilya: Naturally!
Elly: Jesus, Nora, don’t you ever feel guilty about disparaging Mayakovsky?
Nora: I do. I do. Considering what a cunt, what a prick he’s been, from time to time I feel a tinge of guilt at not feeling guilty.
Lilya: (laughing bitterly) Well, here we certainly are, ladies, just as he imagined: three lovers and one latent lover—that’s you, Tatiana—meeting in a hotel room to reminisce about V. Mayakovsky. Where was I? Yes, yes, we were drinking Osip’s Polish vodka, the Poet and I, and oh, Christ, at one point he nearly fell off of his chair but, catching hold of the table to steady himself, he began delivering one of those late-night, booze-lubricated Mayakovsky monologues, this one on the subject of what had driven Yesenin to suicide. He seemed to think that his friend had been backed into a corner: He could either defend the Revolution he had endorsed when he was an idealistic young man—when he was dazzled by the diamond crystals on the branch of hornbeam—or he could kill himself. Curiously, in Mayakovsky’s telling, there was no middle ground, no no-man�
��s-land where a public figure like Yesenin, who drank heavily and brawled his way through life, could hide from both the Bolshevik authorities and from his adoring public. Which, in the Gospel according to dear Mayakovsky, left Yesenin stranded between Scylla and Charybdis. The Poet, convinced that it was easier to abandon the Revolution, through exile or suicide, than to defend it, wrote:
Dying is not hard.
Making life
is much harder.
Tatiana: Where was Pasternak in all this?
Lilya: Pasternak shared Mayakovsky’s grief over the death of Yesenin. Still, he and Mayakovsky found more and more to argue about as the decade drew to a close. Their high opinions of each other’s poetic gift never wavered, though Pasternak was persuaded that Mayakovsky had neglected his gift in his fervor to support the Revolution. In the end their divergent views of the Revolution and what it had achieved, and most especially where it was heading, left them with less and less common ground.
Nora: The intellectuals, the artists I knew were all tormented by these questions. Sometimes it seemed as if they talked about nothing else, though it must be said that when they criticized Stalin and the Party, they did so in a whisper, barely moving their lips.
Lilya: Nora’s correct, of course. Pasternak and Mayakovsky were no exception to Nora’s rule. They were both tormented, though their torment manifested itself differently. These differences came to a head one night in our flat. It was, if memory serves, in 1929.
Nora: A great many things came to a head in 1929. Leon Trotsky was expelled from Russia. Nikolai Bukharin, the only Bolshevik in the superstructure who could be accused of being something of a humanist, was forced out of the Politburo. In the winter of that year Stalin, hoping to liquidate the kulaks, launched his so-called revolution from above: the brutal collectivization of agriculture, which left millions to starve to death in a man-induced famine in the Ukraine.
The Mayakovsky Tapes Page 12