This was nothing short of a Whitmanian catalogue, down to the phrases Max used. If Whitman had given us an America that never existed, Max was now reinventing Moscow as a larger version of Greenwich Village. Lloyd George had called Russia an “unhealthy country.” But Max, relishing the “democracy of manners and aspects and attitudes” he found there, had never felt healthier in his life. Everyone he talked to thought the Bolsheviks were carrying the world to a new and better future, a better civilization. This was the same Russia that, in 1920, had become the first country to legalize abortion, a fact surely not lost on the old feminist Max.25
There were some worrying factors, to be sure. The effects of the famine that had affected mostly the Volga and Ural regions the year before and had killed millions of people were still being felt. The cost of living was high, and the prices in the stores were worse than New York. “One can’t imagine where people get the money.” A newly rich class of traders and speculators was rapidly consolidating itself. How could the workers be in charge when people beside them were enjoying comforts denied to them? “Either the workmen will take it away from them again en masse—or they will yield to the ‘influence,’” Max reasoned. “Wealth will rule.”26
A few months earlier Comrade Stalin, a name that had so far meant little to Max, had been appointed general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And in May 1922 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to the world as Lenin, had suffered the first of his several strokes. The future fate of Russia was unfolding before Max’s very eyes, though he likely didn’t realize it. He did not know that, just the year before, Yevgeny Zamyatin had completed his antiutopian novel We, a relentless analysis of the ideologies underlying totalitarian reform movements such as Bolshevism, which the Russian censors promptly banned. And while poets like Alexander Blok felt they were suffocating under Bolshevik rule—in February 1921 Blok had issued one last, desperate plea for “freedom of creation”—Max comfortably moved among other expatriates. He found the revolutionary activist’s life irresistibly charming. He paid a visit to the house of Ludwig Martens, recently deported from the United States after running the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, the informal Russian trade agency, and now a member of the Soviet on National Economy. Everyone there was either just coming from or going to somewhere else. “So much fun having a revolutionary International, it will be a pity when the work is done.” All of this was wonderful material for a writer. “Why doesn’t somebody write an international novel?” One day even the long-lost buddy from his Croton days, George Andreytchine, showed up at the Hotel Lux, fresh from Paris.27
With great enthusiasm Max watched Mikhail Kalenin, the president of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and nominally the head of the Russian state, receive petitioners at his office, who had come with requests ranging from a new tea set to an education: “They come crying and go away laughing” (fig. 31). Over two hundred people had shown up on that particular day, many of them leaning forward to whisper long tales confidentially into Kalenin’s patient ears. The wonderful thing was that everyone who had traveled to Moscow with a petition got to see this “patient friendly alert intelligent little man” with the wide nose, the wavy hair, and the unkempt beard. A dispenser of “good cool moral advice,” Kalenin had become a kind of father confessor to those otherwise not listened to: “It seems to me this is one of the most wonderful inventions of the political intelligentsia of the Bolsheviks.” Max recognized the showiness of the event, but he felt that Kalenin served an important function: “A petitioner instead of going to some sub-deputy-doorkeeper and gradually working his way up to someone who can handle his case, goes discreetly to the President of the Republic, who either handles his case (if it can be settled with a word and a signature) or directs him to the proper official.” Being able to go and share their needs with Grandpa Kalenin, as he became known, gave people an intimate connection with their government that was unknown in capitalist countries. And it gave the president “something to do besides preside.” That was the one valuable concept behind the antiquated idea of the monarchy.28
Figure 31. Oscar Cesare, “Kalenin, president of Soviet Russia, Receiving and Listening to the Appeals and Complaints of Workers.” Drawing, 1922. Published in Paxton Hibben, “Lenin’s Little Father Substitute,” New York Times Magazine, November 12, 1922. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
The great cartoonist Oscar Cesare, known simply as Cesare, who was also staying at the sugar-king’s residence, accompanied Max during his visit. While he was in Moscow Cesare had managed to gain access to the elusive Lenin and sketched his portrait, an event he excitedly shared with the readers of the New York Times.29 At Kalenin’s office Cesare drew not only the president but also his secretary, an overburdened woman who, while talking on the telephone, managed to critique Cesare’s portrait, pointing out with a smile (“in that friendly way that Russian girls do”) that he had made her nose appear sharper than it was. That indeed was the new Russia.30
Outside Kalenin’s office Max ran into the journalist Paxton Hibben, who was already disenchanted with his Russian experience, deploring the loss of idealism around him. Russia wasn’t “starving the way it was last year,” he said reproachfully. Cesare and Hibben came along the next day when Max and Albert, led by a reporter from Izvestia and a red guard, toured the Kremlin, a powerful experience. All the literary stereotypes—“gorgeous chambers,” “regal splendor,” “imperial magnificence”—applied. “You find out what those words mean.” The insignia of the Comintern—the banner of the International, the water pitchers, the gavel, the long table, and modern chairs—looked incongruous yet oddly reassuring amid all the ostentatious gold of faded tsarist glory. Almost against his will Max was moved when he saw “the sheltered soft quiet bed” where Nicholas had slept, surrounded by the little pictures he had treasured, and the extravagant bathtub made of pure silver. “Something very pathetic about being a Czar—never having a chance to be humble.” But these reminders of Nicholas’s life seemed irrelevant now, as everywhere around Max there was “life, energy, movement.”31
In the evening Max went to see the neofuturist ballet in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Trade Unions, where most recently Lenin’s show trials of the members of the Socialist Revolutionary had been held and where a bust of the tsar had been replaced by one of Lenin. Max was sure the music critics of New York would have collapsed in “spasms of indignation.” But much to his surprise he discovered he didn’t like the ballet either, the first real sign of trouble in Max’s developing love affair with communist Russia. Max watched in disbelief as the bodies of young men and women squirmed through convulsions that made as little sense as the stage set, “a series of platforms, ladders, steps, and peculiar things which might be called yard-drums.” On this complicated and ultimately meaningless scaffolding, to music by Claude Debussy and others, these beautiful dancers—whether they were naked or not, one couldn’t tell—would contort their bodies in ways that lacked all thought and feeling, “like all the distinctively modernist art of the times.” This was “cold experimentation with the technique of art,” though Max was relieved to see that at least those Russians were no Puritans.32
Max was eager to improve his Russian, a language he said was marked by “graceful soft winding and lingering beauty” when spoken the right way but sounded unexciting and toneless when spoken in an ordinary fashion. He met up with Eliena Krylenko again, who not only taught him a few lessons but also cooked for him and told him she couldn’t bear watching how the workers had their rights gradually taken away from them while the Bolsheviks stood by and did nothing about the situation. But Max, as always, spread his affections rather evenly, striking up a relationship with a girl named Tonya, the daughter of a tsarist general who was constantly complaining that life in communist Russia had ceased to be life. Tonya put on the national costume, probably for Max’s sake, looking utterly beautiful. When she began to dance, her fa
ther, forgetting his gripes, joined in, leaving Max with the impression that it was not life in general but, rather, the general’s life that had been upset by the revolution and that that was what he had been complaining about.33
During his first winter in Russia Max saw the big changes the revolution had brought to the country, but he was still convinced they would all be beneficial. He didn’t agree with the bourgeois Russians and their American friends he met at the parties in Moscow, who went around calling the Bolsheviks names. “I wonder why they weren’t all summarily shot in the revolution,” he exclaimed in a moment of uncharacteristic intolerance. He was at least trying to like the paintings of “big, dramatic, vigorous things” Eliena showed him when she took him to an art gallery. (He made an exception for the “hideous” Lenin Monument.) And he was delighted to see Irma Duncan, of Isadorables fame, and to hear she was teaching Isadora’s “great art” to Russian children. Maybe he, too, could create a life for himself in Russia?34
Max redoubled his efforts to become fluent in Russian. He tried his hand at another Lermontov poem, this time “The Sail,” a poem that had made a deep impression on him. In the lonely white sail on the misty, wide ocean, “flying from what in the homeland / Seeking for what in the new,” he certainly recognized aspects of his own situation, and he might have read the speaker’s final characterization of the traveler as a prophetic summary of his own daring:
Beneath him the stream, luminous, azure;
Above him the sun’s golden breast;
But he, a rebel, invites the storms
As though in the storms were rest.35
As if to make good on Lermontov’s endorsement of risky travel, Max obtained passes for himself and Albert to travel to Sevastopol on the southwestern Crimean Peninsula, a thirty-eight-hour train ride, again in a car equipped with all the available luxuries. After his arrival Max was instantly smitten with the beautiful, permanently tanned Crimean girls. Snippets from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” swirled through his head as he continued on to the famous resort town of Yalta, on the opposite side of the southern tip of the peninsula, a “wilder and less cozy Italy.” There, in the town that had once seduced Anton Chekhov into building a villa, Max settled down, too, with the sun-kissed sea in view. He was long convinced there was a direct connection between sex and linguistic proficiency, and he immediately went ahead and picked a language tutor. Nina Smirnova, an attractive, safely married woman who was vacationing in Yalta, became his utchitelnitza, or teacher.36
Studying Russian and “lying in bed all morning” quickly became synonymous for Max. Under the influence of the Crimean sun, political pontifications gave way to idle observations about language and national character. What, for example, did it really mean that there were no definite articles in Russian? Lazy mornings were followed by lazier afternoons sunning and swimming in the nude on their favorite portion of the beach, which Max and Nina, in honor of their newfound love, christened, perhaps not quite originally, “MaxNina” (МаксНина). Remnants of the old order were still visible. Max noted with interest that, though joint bathing was permitted, beach areas reserved for women would be separated by about fifty yards.37
It didn’t bother Max that his utchitelnitza, self-assured and patient as well as passionate, was no friend of the Bolsheviks. Her husband was a Social Democrat, and she was convinced the Communist Party, despite Lenin’s obvious intelligence, would stand in the way of progress. Max, by contrast, was still intent on finding the Bolsheviks likable. On one of their strolls along the coast Max was eyeing some tasty-looking grapes in one of the tsar’s former vineyards near the Imperial Palace in Livadiya, with a guard positioned right in front. The tsar’s grapes protected by the Red Army? “Will you shoot us if we steal a grape?” The young man turned away from Max and Nina as though he were going to get his gun. When he emerged again, his hands were full of grapes, a scene as if from a Murillo painting and no doubt of great symbolic significance to Max in his quest for the good in Bolshevism.38
Chatting with the youth in town, Max heard repeatedly how members of the bourgeoisie—admirers of the White Russian general Pyotr Wrangel—were shot or thrown into the sea. But Max also noted how even those opposed to government did not seem to be afraid to say what they were thinking. And most of all, he was proud of his ability to understand them. Learning a new language was easy if people were willing to follow his example and not try to study “20 different things at once.” In a month anyone could learn to communicate with patient people in any foreign language. That said, the Russian language was certainly special. Max was fascinated by the various aspects of verbs, “one when they intend to finish” something and one “when they don’t.” Understanding the difference was crucial: “You discuss what you want with a waiter and he goes off in the middle of his discussion. That was the aspect he was talking in.” But what seemed confusing to the outsider was in fact a set of clear directives to the native speaker.39
Relishing his newly acquired language, warmed by Nina’s eager embraces, Max never wanted to leave. Yalta was a holiday of the senses, a vacation not only from the personal complications of his existence in America but also from the political complexities of Moscow. Here was all he wanted: “Study, sunshine, salt-water, swimming and showing off how bright I am. What more can the heart desire?” Watching the lovely nude bodies of women, separated from the men, “lying in heaps on the beach,” he gave tribute to the one god left from the pantheon of his youth, the sun: human flesh was so lovely when “colored in the sun.” Nina certainly felt that their time was running out, especially in view of the fact that her husband was on his way to Yalta. In letters to Max she found herself arguing with God, who had given her “great love” for Max but not the opportunity to stay with him. “If God would give me one month to be with you in Yalta, I would give him an entire year of my life.” She consoled herself with the thought that they would meet again in Moscow or Kharkov. “I am such an optimist, . . . but right now I am sad.”40 On their last evening together the couple had dinner in a restaurant and danced to the languid strains of Sydney Baines’s “Destiny Waltz.”41
Oh, Yalta. Everything seemed possible then. And yet there were people who sowed doubt in Max’s mind: the old woman in burlap rags near the Red Army barracks who, with tears streaming down her face, took him to a place where people had been shot and exclaimed, “They did this to Russia—you tell this to the people in America. The world needs to know what we’ve come to. . . . I pray for Nicolas and I pray for the return of the grand duke.” And the peasant who, when asked if he wanted Wrangel back, responded that he did not want any more change: “We want to work the land, that’s all. It makes no difference—Czar, Communists, or God. We want peace and a chance to go to work.” Or the man on the train who said there were plenty of communists in Russia who did not want to be disciplined by any party.42
But then there were highly satisfying experiences, too. On his way back from Yalta, in Kharkov, Max and Albert were cordially received by the first chairman of the Ukrainian government, Christian Rakovsky, who bent over backward to find them an appropriate room, with mixed success. Although the Ukrainian army, railroad, postal service, telegraphs, and telephones were all controlled by Moscow, Rakovsky was following his own independent course. Max was pleased to see that he and Mme Rakovsky had turned the best homes of the bourgeoisie in Kharkov into crèches, hospitals, maternity centers, and orphanages. The shores of the Black Sea were lined with homes for children and workers in need of rest.43
Nina continued to long for Max, impatiently awaiting his letters, imagining herself kissing his “beautiful white head” and his oh-so-desirable tanned body. If their relationship, to Max, had been part of the fantastic unreality of the entire Russian experience, to Nina it was painfully real. As she was waiting for him she was learning English. Why had she fallen so deeply in love with him? Hypnosis (perhaps Max had shared his skills with her) didn’t help. Did his new teacher—here Nina used t
he feminine form, an indication she knew Eliena had taken over again—love him as much as she had loved him?44 A note written around the time of Max’s departure shows that, regardless of what would happen to their relationship, Nina was going to be fine. First there was despair: “Our beautiful little fairytale by the sea has come to an end. . . . Tomorrow Max begins a new life, a new fairytale . . . there will be another Nina, and then another, and then another.” And then came insight, proof that utchitelnitza was ultimately made of the same material as her Max: “And what is to become of Nina from Yalta? Stupid little Nina. She will love and wait for her Max for a long time; she will treasure the fairytale of the sea; and then, most likely, she too will begin to search for a new fairytale, a new Max.”45
In December 1922 Max witnessed the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, the last one attended by Lenin, who delivered a speech but was too weak to show up for any regular sessions. The resolutions passed were unabashedly self-congratulatory. The delegates affirmed that the predictions of the Third Congress regarding the world economic crisis and the tasks of the Communist International had been completely borne out by the course of events and by the development of the workers’ movement. Capitalism had maneuvered itself into a place that was entirely at odds with basic human rights. One of the main dangers confronting a unified communist movement was “democratic pacifism,” a defense likely to be used by bourgeois democracies; the adequate response was to be as militant as possible in continuing the spread of the workers’ movement. And the main challenge facing every Communist Party was to strengthen its influence in the factories.
Max was more interested in the people than in the theories that were spouted. He was delighted to see again his old friend Claude McKay, the “prince of the revolution,” luminous “like a black pearl” among the delegates. McKay assured the communists that “Negro soldiers” would be fighting not only for their own emancipation but for the emancipation of the working classes the world over. The German delegate Clara Zetkin delivered a strong plea on behalf of the women of all classes, not just the workers, and impressed Max greatly: “bluntly mild” in form and face, she was a grandmother with a “tiger’s mouth,” and she dared to use the word “democracy,” which had been banned from the official discourse. The “unfalteringness” of most of the delegates, their confidence in their own rightness, got on Max’s nerves, as did their hatred of centrists, an attitude Max felt had diminished and hardened the Comintern. The international workers’ movement should be in the hands of big men with big minds, not little guys like Nikolai Bukharin, whom Max compared to a canary. The dogged chanting of party songs (“that terrible Sunday School tune over and over again—stanza after stanza”) indicated patience as well as a terrible lack of humor: “Not one shaft of illumination so far.” How could Grigory Zinoviev, the president of the Comintern, a “complete stranger to joy,” a man with an irritatingly high-pitched voice and a smile in his eyes that never connected with “anything in his lips” and vanished almost as soon as one had perceived it, seriously hope to make, as he said, the world more beautiful? Max couldn’t understand how the delegates were able to sit through these uninspired speeches, speeches “without a ray of light in them.” They didn’t play; they didn’t need to play.46
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