by Mark Mazower
Among Max’s secrets the story of André’s mother was perhaps the most tightly guarded of all. That Dad knew anything was thanks to his aunt Niura, Frouma’s sister, with whom André had briefly been close when she was living in Paris. Niura had learned that Max had a relationship before the First World War with a fellow revolutionary, a young woman called Krylenko. Dad had grown up under the impression that she died shortly after André was born and that this was why he had been raised in London by Max. There was a famous Bolshevik called Nicolai Krylenko and Niura thought they might have been related, perhaps were even siblings. But what her first name was neither Niura nor Dad knew.
Over the phone, André now delivered a small bombshell: The text at the beginning of the notebook that Dad had brought to Madrid from Oakeshott Avenue back in 1965 indicated, so André said, that Max had not been his father at all. Apparently what it showed was that his real father had been an Austrian military doctor named Dr. Karl von Hörnigk, who had disappeared while on a mission for the Red Cross in Russia before 1914. Max must have been a friend of von Hörnigk, said André, and agreed to act as guardian while his mother went to Russia to search for her Austrian husband. André added that his mother was called Sofia Krylenko and she had indeed been a sister of Nicolai Krylenko, a man who later rose to the uppermost echelons of power in the Kremlin as the Soviet commissar of justice before falling victim to Stalin’s Terror himself. (The same Nicolai Krylenko subsequently found immortalization, if that is the right word, as one of the principal villains of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.) André also told Dad that his mother had been married a second time, to a Belgian doctor named von Mayer, before ending up in Moscow where her brother had confined her to a mental asylum. André had communicated with her under her married name of von Mayer right up to the outbreak of the Second World War and had then lost all trace of her. “This came as a considerable surprise to me, as you can imagine,” was Dad’s laconic summing up.
I remember sitting across the kitchen table from Dad as we turned this new information over and over in our minds and tried to figure it out. Unmistakable in the whole complicated story was André’s repudiation of Max’s parentage. The rest was really quite odd and confusing: Was the Red Cross actually sending Hapsburg officers to Tsarist Russia on its behalf just before the First World War? Was the doctor, if he had ever existed, likely to have been such good friends with a Russian Jewish socialist that he would ask him to act as his child’s guardian, as the document—if it was a document—appeared to indicate? Why would Max have agreed at a very difficult time in his life to care for an infant who was not his? It all sounded unlikely.
Dad’s suspicions were heightened when André sent him a copy of what he said was Max’s statement of guardianship. The Russian vocabulary used was postrevolutionary and some terms sounded as if they had been badly translated from another language. The handwriting was all wrong too—one thing Dad did know was what his father’s always precise hand had looked like—and there were elementary spelling mistakes and small but crucial discrepancies in the Russian patronymics. When André, who did not know Russian, assured Dad, who did, that it could have been written by Max because his handwriting had changed as he got older, Dad became fed up with the whole matter. He had always believed his half brother to be a “highly imaginative character”—no compliment in Dad’s book. But this latest communication of André’s puzzled him. The von Hörnigk character seemed fake. After all, why should his father have been so upset with André during his visits home if he had not really been his father? The intensity in Max’s feelings suggested kinship.
I doubt Dad would have minded to learn he and André were not blood relatives. What I think did disturb him was to be reminded after so many years of the fierceness of his half brother’s wish to repudiate their father and everything he stood for, especially now that André’s tendency to fantasy had apparently tipped over into a kind of amateurish forgery. Dad’s inward judgments could be harsh and uncompromising, but usually he kept these very well hidden and did not tell people what he thought of them. However André’s behavior touched a nerve and was impossible for him to forgive. Other letters followed containing ever more fantastic claims and demands, and at the start of 1991, Dad broke off the correspondence. Yet the uncertainties gnawed away at him. When he wrote to his long-lost cousin Osya later that year about what he called “the mystery of André,” he confessed that he was still in the dark: “My parents never spoke about it in my presence. Did your father ever mention anything about it?”
Dad remembered André’s visits home with scant sympathy for his half brother and barely suppressed anger. What remained with him was how upset these stays could leave his parents; causing them pain was, in his view, the cardinal sin for a son. Yet for André, to have had to rely on Max and Frouma for intermittent shelter and support into his forties must itself have been a source of anguish; to me, it feels as if he were making an unconscious demand for the repayment of a different kind of debt. Dad was the younger son who had been given the parental love André never had. Above all, Dad had enjoyed a mother’s care in its most tender and unquestioning form. The original source of André’s emotional deprivation was surely not in Oakeshott Avenue at all, not in the figure of his taciturn father who was unable to express the solicitude that lay inside him. It was rather in the house, the home, that had existed for him only as a momentary glimpse in an uncertain land at an age too young for it to mean more than loss, a home briefly animated by his never mentioned mother, the absence behind the absence that he himself was to become.
André’s naturalization papers, which are held in the National Archives in London, offer a chance to test his 1987 version of his parentage against a much older one. “André Mazower, from France. Resident in London”—entered thus in the Home Office register—had applied for naturalization in the summer of 1933. He stated in front of a solicitor that his father was Mordchel Mazower—“of Polish nationality”—and that his mother was “Sofia Vassilievna Krylenko of uncertain nationality.” If she was indeed related to the well-known Bolshevik, this was the correct patronymic. (In contrast, André’s fake document named her as “Sofia Krylienko, Russian, born in St. Petersburg, Russia, 15 October 1886, the son of Ivan Krylienko and Tamara Kornilova,” which was a total fiction and got pretty much everything wrong—including her patronymic and the parents’ names.) Although the Home Office file contains much other information, it says nothing more of any consequence about his mother: André declared at that time that all he knew about her was that she was in the USSR and that he feared she was dead. No one in Whitehall, on the evidence of the file, appears to have drawn the connection with her brother Nicolai.
Nicolai Krylenko was by that time an internationally recognizable public figure, and he was known to have had a brother and several sisters—there was Olga, a pianist called Vera, and Elena, who was well-known to historians of the American Left because she had married the legendary radical Max Eastman. But had there also been a Sofia, or was this nothing more than a family myth? I asked a friend of mine, a historian who knows as much about Stalin’s Russia as anyone alive, but he had never heard of her and could find no reference to her in any of the standard works.
Then I discovered I was not the only one looking for her: André’s son had been doing the same thing before me. One April evening in 1997, ten years after his father’s phone call to Dad, he had accessed an Internet site specializing in Russian family histories and, without specifying his own relationship to André, had sought the help of other subscribers for information about his grandmother: “I am doing this research on the behalf of her son (now aged 88) and would really be glad if I could assist him in finding more about his mother (he only met her twice after she left for Russia).”
Was it my imagination or did the wording of that final sentence suggest that before she left for Russia—he seemed to think she had gone back around 1911 or 1912—André had seen much more of her, perhaps even been
with her until then? At that point he would have been around two and a half, too young to have clear memories of that period but old enough to know they had been together, especially since they had met and written to each other after that date.
But if André was living with his mother, it was not yet in England and not with Max. April 1911 was the month of the U.K. census, and Max (“a Russian visitor”) was listed on the form as living on his own in lodgings in Gordon Place in Bloomsbury. (He was briefly in London to report back to his employers at the Yost Typewriter Company.) The strange thing is that on the page of the census return for his boardinghouse, Max declared himself a married man with a wife and child. He filled in the number of years he had been married (three) and the number of children he had (one) and then he or someone else crossed them out, since only women were required to provide this kind of information. But his error is a clue. Because 1908 was the year he would have met Sofia Krylenko, the child thus referred to had to have been André. Was he already anticipating bringing André and his mother to England?
Sofia and André’s absence from the U.K. census was consistent with something else. Online, André’s son had also mentioned a stay in the Belgian city of Liège around this time. He added that after living there, Sofia had returned to Russia and married someone called “de Mayer”—was this the Belgian doctor André had mentioned to Dad?—and that she’d had “two or three children” with him before she was eventually sent in the 1920s to somewhere called Mas Gorsk, where she died. He mentioned that she had been a Menshevik, which was perhaps, he speculated, why she had been living in Paris and Liège, both prewar centers of Menshevik activity.
There seem to have been no very helpful online responses. But it turns out the essentials were correct: The infamous Nicolai Krylenko did have a sister called Sofia and she was indeed André’s mother and she did marry a man called de (or von) Meyer (or Mayer) and have other children. Now that I have been able to piece together a few more fragments of information about her, I can see that it is not surprising André was so in the dark about her: She was an even more elusive and troubled figure than he was, and several people besides Max had good reason to want to draw as little attention to her as possible.
The idyllic Mediterranean setting of Capri has had a long association with the European Left, and in the early summer of 1924 it was the site of an important love affair in the cultural history of modernism. Asja Lacis, a left-wing Latvian agitprop theater director, was staying on the island, which was a holiday magnet for the avant-garde of central Europe despite Mussolini’s growing grip on power in Rome. While in the market one day she encountered an unhappily married bespectacled German Jewish intellectual who was having difficulty finishing his dissertation and flirting with the thought of leaving Europe to try his luck in Palestine. His name was Walter Benjamin, and he fell deeply in love with her. Their meeting and subsequent affair has been credited with transforming his thinking, reorienting it away from his earlier interest in theology and Jewish mysticism and towards an engagement with Marxism and the Soviet experiment. People disagree on whether this was for the better or not, but few question the importance of the meeting. Fewer have paid sufficient attention to Lacis who was a remarkable woman in her own right, a friend of Bertolt Brecht, a pioneer of proletarian theater, a beauty, and a survivor of Stalinism; she died in Latvia in 1979. And I would hazard a guess that no one at all has bothered with the figure of Sofia Krylenko, who hovers on the story’s margins.
Lacis, it turns out, was a friend of Sofia’s, and in Recuerdo de Walter Benjamin en Capri, an extract from her memoirs, originally written in Latvian but available in Spanish, she tells us that Sofia was also staying on Capri where they spent a lot of time together. She mentions their visit to the maverick Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the futurist movement. They were overwhelmed by the magnificence of his garden, his liking for Gabriele D’Annunzio’s writings, and the fact that Marinetti’s wife, the artist Benedetta Cappa, was dressed only in futurist black-and-white. (Marinetti, whose right-wing sympathies were by then pretty evident, was another captive to the splendor of what he called “the Futurist island.”) That is all Lacis tells us. But it is sufficient to give us a glimpse of Sofia, moving in Leftist circles in Continental Europe in the mid-1920s, a woman of culture and independence and means, a modernist, a free spirit.
By this time she had not one but three children, all of whom were being looked after by others, and we know this because when the infatuated Benjamin followed Lacis to Moscow two and a half years later, he called in an idle moment to see Sofia. She was not there but he found another Krylenko—the redoubtable matriarch, Olga—living in a rented, sparsely furnished apartment. The drabness of it impressed itself upon him, as he wrote in his Moscow Diary: “If people manage to bear rooms which look like infirmaries after inspection, it is because their way of life has so alienated them from domestic existence.”
He could not have been more on the mark. Where Sofia was concerned, alienation from domesticity was something like the leitmotif of her way of being: Benjamin, who knew her slightly in Germany, describes her as stubborn and estranged “but not entirely severed” from her family. As it turned out, she was not in Moscow at the time of his visit, nor even in the Soviet Union, but Benjamin did meet her two daughters—they struck him as slightly sad—who shuttled between their grandmother and her mother, “not having seen their mother for years.” There is no mention of any de Meyer (or von Mayer). The children, according to Benjamin, were products of “her first marriage to a nobleman who fought on the Bolshevik side during the civil war and died.” By coincidence, while Benjamin was there, Sofia’s younger daughter was opening a letter from her mother who wrote from Germany that she was in some difficulties and might have to leave. Her “illegal work”—presumably for the underground Left—was responsible. And then Benjamin adds some enigmatic words that convey the family’s reaction: “she is a calamity and her mother is visibly upset.”1
Why? The reasons were evidently political, although against and for whom Sofia was working was not clear to me when I read Benjamin’s remarks. But she had evidently never made the turn to familial life that Max and other prewar revolutionaries had. She had remained an activist and castigated others for their compromises. Like her son, she was a person who preferred communicating with her family by letter, and she lived on the edge and was involved in activities that alarmed them. Yet she apparently had good enough relations with them to make it plausible that she would have considered one day returning to Moscow where her daughters were living. Overall, Benjamin’s account made André’s story seem more rather than less likely. For if Sofia had indeed once been a Menshevik, as he seems to have thought, then her presence would have over time become very much more than merely inconvenient to her family in the Soviet Union, since her brother Nicolai, as the prosecutor general of the USSR, was hunting down opponents of the Bolsheviks and would later be entrusted by Stalin with the trial of the so-called Menshevik conspirators in a show trial in 1931.
Benjamin and Lacis are not the only figures on the Left to offer us a glimpse of Sofia. Closer to home, there was also her younger sister, Elena. In the early 1920s Elena had met the prominent American radical Max Eastman and had begun an enduring relationship through which Eastman came to know the entire Krylenko family.
In 1924 Elena and Eastman left the USSR and three years later moved for good to the United States, where Elena became an accomplished painter, a dancer, and the confidante to many leading figures of interwar American progressivism. What I did not know was how much she had been able to stay in touch with her family in Russia after she had reached America. Since her personal papers are held along with Eastman’s in the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, I contacted the archivists. And there I found the answer. On February 25, 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party, had electrified the world by delivering a speech in which
he criticized Stalin and the crimes of the Terror. One of the consequences was the rehabilitation of many of his victims, among them, ironically, Nicolai Krylenko. Elena, who was already suffering from the cancer that was to kill her, wrote to Nikolai Bulganin, the premier of the USSR, that September from her home on Martha’s Vineyard.
Dear Sir,
Since my brother Nikolai Krylenko has been rehabilitated I venture to ask you to tell me of the fate of the other members of our immediate family—my sisters, Olga, Vera, and Sophia, and their children, and also my second brother, Vladimir Krylenko, a mining engineer. My last news of the family came from Olga in 1935. Since then I have received no letter and no word or news from any one of them in spite of my repeated attempts to get into communication by mail.
Another note in the same file confirmed the existence of a husband called Meyer and their daughters, André’s half sisters: “Sister—Sophia MEYER [née Krylenko]. Had two daughters: Natalia and Caterina.”
Because André’s British naturalization papers stated that he had been born in Paris, the next thing I did was to order his birth certificate from the French authorities, hoping it might shed light on the question of his paternity. It did and it didn’t. Late at night on March 3, 1909, it said, the “student” Sofia Krylenko had given birth to a son at a lying-in hospital, the Clinique Tarnier, beside the Jardin du Luxembourg. And the father? “De père non denommé.” As was customary in cases of birth outside wedlock, he had not been named, a further indication that André had indeed been illegitimate. There had been no wedding and the Hapsburg-officer story that André had tried on Dad was a myth.
In the file, appended to the certificate, there was also a note, written more than twenty years later, on which the heading “Krylenko” was scored through and replaced with “Mazower.” Max (named here as “Morchel Mazower”) had presented himself to the French consulate in London on February 24, 1930, in order to acknowledge his paternity—this was the time when André was applying for a French passport—and when the mairie of the sixth arrondissement received a copy, an official placed it next to the birth certificate.2