They continued to correspond, and Sverdlov continued to urge hope and faith (hope as a function of faith). The first of his surviving letters was the one sent to the Dormitory for Female Students on Sophia Embankment in May 1904, when he was nineteen (“The real day is coming, after all…. The dawn, which sheds its fantastic, enchanting, and transparent light over everything and everyone, is near”). The last one, to Kira Egon-Besser in Petrograd, was written in Monastyrskoe on January 20, 1917, when he was thirty-two and she was eighteen:
My worldview ensures that my certainty in the triumph of a life of harmony, free from all manner of filth, cannot disappear. Just as unshakeable is my certainty that future life will produce pure human beings, beautiful in every respect. Yes, there is much evil in the world today. But to understand and discover its causes is to understand its transient nature. That is why isolated, but sometimes difficult, feelings of dejection are drowned out by the overall optimism of my approach to life. That’s the whole secret. It has nothing to do with a rejection of private life. On the contrary, it is precisely this approach to life that makes a full private life possible, a life in which people are fused into a single whole not only physically, but also spiritually.98
Around the time this letter would have arrived in Petrograd, the workers of the Putilov Plant began the strike that would become the first phase of the February Revolution—and possibly the last act of the human tragedy. Sverdlov heard the news in early March, and, accompanied by Filipp (“Georges”) Goloshchekin, jumped into a sled and set out up the Enisei in a mad rush to reach Krasnoiarsk before the ice began to break up. After more than two weeks of ceaseless travel, they arrived, and by March 29 had made it all the way to Petrograd.
According to Novgorodtseva, they went straight to the apartment of Sverdlov’s sister Sarra.
Later she talked about how Yakov Mikhailovich had appeared out of nowhere and started peppering her with questions about what was happening in Petrograd, with their comrades, and in the Central Committee (at the time, Sarra was helping Elena Stasova in the Central Committee secretariat).
Having answered barely a tenth of the questions, Sarra suddenly remembered that her brother must be hungry after his long journey and started to fan the samovar when Yakov Mikhailovich suddenly grabbed his head and moaned:
“Oh no! Georges!”
“Georges? Georges who?”
“Goloshchekin! I left him downstairs by the entrance, told him I’d go see if you were in and be right back. It’s been half an hour. Would you mind going to get him? He’ll kill me for sure if I go. He’s easy to spot: tall, skinny, with a goatee, and wearing a black hat. In other words, a regular Don Quixote.”
Sarra ran out and immediately spotted Goloshchekin, who was shifting from one foot to the other, looking despondent. She brought him in, served them both tea, and then took them to the Tauride Palace, where, in a corridor, at the entrance to one of the rooms, Elena Dmitrievna Stasova had placed a desk under a large, handwritten sign that said: “RSDRP(b), Central Committee Secretariat.”99
Kira Egon-Besser had to wait a day or two longer. “One evening in late March [she writes in her memoir], the doorbell rang. When I heard the sound of his familiar booming bass coming from the entryway, I came running and saw Yakov Mikhailovich. He kissed me on both cheeks.”100
■ ■ ■
Revolution was inseparable from love. It demanded sacrifices for the sake of a future harmony, and it required harmony—in love, comradeship, and book learning—as a condition for fulfillment. Most revolutionary leaders were young men who identified the Revolution with womanhood; many of them were men in love who identified particular women with the Revolution. Becoming a Bolshevik meant joining a band of brothers (and, possibly, sisters); living as a Bolshevik meant favoring some brothers over others and loving some sisters as much as the Revolution. “Who do I confess my weakness to, if not to you, my dear, my sweetheart?” wrote Sverdlov to Novgorodtseva. “The more thorough the analysis to which we subject our relationship, the more profound, I would even say, thrillingly profound, it becomes.” Revolutionary introspection relied on “a union of two kindred spirits filled with the same emotion and faith.” After 1914, Sverdlov’s hope for the real day seemed fused with his wish to kiss Kira Egon-Besser.101
Valerian Osinsky
(Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
Sverdlov’s last letter about the real day took about a month to come true. Valerian Osinsky wrote his in late February 1917, at the time of its fulfillment. Born “Valerian Obolensky” in the family of a veterinarian of noble birth, he had debated Kerzhentsev in his Moscow gymnasium, shared a prison cell with Bukharin, and served as an “agitator” in the Swamp after the 1905 Revolution. He was famously tall, studious, radical, and aloof. In February 1917, he was thirty years old and married to a fellow revolutionary, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova. They had a five-year-old son, Vadim, whom they called “Dima.” His correspondent, Anna Mikhailovna Shaternikova, was in her mid-twenties, a devoted Marxist, and a volunteer nurse. They had met a few months earlier in a hospital in Yalta, where he was being treated for tuberculosis. They were in love, but could not, for the time being, be together. They knew that their individual fates depended on the future of mankind as a whole. They were certain that that future was near, but did not know that it had already reached Petrograd.102 Osinsky’s letter contains his prose translation of the last three stanzas of Émile Verhaeren’s “Blacksmith” (“Le Forgeron”), with detailed line-by-line commentary:
The mob, whose sacred fury always rises above itself, is an immensely inspired force, projected by the will of those to come, that will erect, with its merciless hands, a new world of insatiable utopia….
The blacksmith, whose hope does not ever stray toward doubt or fear, sees before him, as if they were already here, the days when the simplest ethical commandments will become the foundation of human existence, serene and harmonious….
Lit up by that luminous faith, the flames of which he has been stoking for many a year in his forge, by the side of the road, next to the tilled fields,
The blacksmith, huge and massive, is hammering with mighty, full blows—as if he were tempering the steel of human souls—the immense blades of patience and silence.
This poem, according to Osinsky, is a prophetic depiction of “the psychology of revolution.” The passage on the power of the mob confirms that “one of life’s greatest pleasures” is to join collective humanity in its sacred fury. The “insatiability” of utopia refers both to the boundlessness of human aspiration and the “pitiless arms of the crowd.” And what is liberation if not the embrace of “the simplest ethical commandments”? “For thousands of years, different moral teachers (Socrates, Christ, Buddha, etc.) have been preaching so-called good,” but their prescriptions have been mutually contradictory and incomplete because they have been based on life in “antagonistic” societies. It has been “savage morality, slave morality, or beggars’ morality—not the morality of a rational, free, and developed society, and thus not fully simple, not primary.” True virtue is contingent on revolution. “Only in the world of insatiable utopia will the simplest ethical rules become real and free from exceptions and contradictions.”
The same is true of love, the “moving force” of ethics in a society liberated from social contradictions. At present, it is circumscribed by personal interests, limited in forms of expression, and “mixed with hatred (albeit the ‘sacred’ kind).” “Over there,” it will “reveal without shame all of its profound tenderness and its charity without embellishment, without the tinkling bells of magnanimity and philanthropy.” This idea seems utopian because it sounds “ethereal, ‘illuminated,’ and a bit banal,” but of course it is not a utopia because all it means is that people will be able to “live and work joyfully and intensely.” It will be “the kind of ‘good time when any grief is easy to bear,’… a time of real social health, as opposed to having one’s head up in the clouds.” (The “easy to bear”
quotation comes from Knut Hamsun’s Victoria, a universal “student” favorite about the life-sustaining power of ethereal love.)
This “luminous faith” (lucide croyance) is not only faith “but also certitude and clairvoyance.” “It is with this luminous, radiant, burning certitude in his eyes that the huge, massive (gourd), heavy, and lumbering blacksmith … swings his hammer.” At the end of his letter, Osinsky claims that his “sometimes spare, inaccurate, and not always rhythmical” translation is much truer to the original than Valery Briusov’s smooth, rhymed version. “You cannot parrot the blacksmith, you have to be him—him … dont l’éspoir ne dévie vers les doutes ni les affres—jamais [him, whose hope does not ever stray toward doubt or fear].” To stress the point, Osinsky suddenly changes his tone and adds: “Tell me, A.M., does this blacksmith—énorme et gourd—remind you of anyone by any chance?”103
■ ■ ■
But the tallest, biggest, bluntest, and loudest of Russia’s blacksmiths was the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In January 1914, “handsome and twenty-two,” he arrived in Odessa as part of a Futurist traveling show also featuring David Burliuk and Vasily Kamensky. “All three,” according to a newspaper report, “were wearing top hats, yellow blouses, and overcoats with radishes in their lapels.” As they were walking along the embankment on the first evening of their visit, Kamensky noticed “an absolutely extraordinary girl: tall, shapely, with magnificent, shining eyes—in short, a real beauty.” He pointed her out to Mayakovsky, who “turned around, looked her slowly up and down, and then suddenly seemed to become extremely agitated. ‘Listen, you two stay here, or do whatever you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you back at the hotel in … well, in a while.’”104
The girl’s name was Maria Denisova, but Mayakovsky called her “La Gioconda.” She was twenty years old. Originally from Kharkov, she had moved to Odessa to attend a gymnasium but had later dropped out and enrolled in sculpture classes at an art studio.105 The next day, the three Futurists were invited to dinner at her older sister’s house. According to Kamensky,
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Maria Denisova
The dinner at La Gioconda’s turned into a triumph of poetry. We spent most of the time reciting poems and saying very special, festive things. Volodia was inspired…. He talked a great deal and was very smart and witty…. I will never forget the way he read his poetry that evening.
When we got back to our hotel, it took us a long time to get over the tremendous impression Maria had made on us.
Burliuk was silent, but looked meaningfully at Volodia, who kept pacing nervously back and forth, unsure about what to do or how to deal with this sudden eruption of love…. He kept asking quietly over and over again:
“What should I do? What can I do? Should I write a letter? But wouldn’t that look stupid? I love you. What more can I say?”106
He did write a letter—not at all like the one from Tatiana to Onegin (“I am writing to you, what more can I say”), but a love letter nonetheless. He called it “The Thirteenth Apostle,” but then, when the censors objected, renamed it A Cloud in Pants. Its addressee was God, among many others, and its subject was the end of love—and everything else.
On the Futurists’ last day in Odessa, Maria told Mayakovsky to wait for her in his hotel room at 4:00 p.m. Two days later, on the train between Nikolaev and Kishinev, Mayakovsky began to recite:107
You think it’s delirium? Malaria?
It happened.
Happened in Odessa,
“I’ll see you at four,” said Maria.
Eight,
Nine,
Ten.
Past midnight, and many anguished stanzas later, she finally came.
You entered,
brusque, matter-of-fact,
torturing the suede of your gloves,
and said:
“Guess what,
I’m getting married.”
Fine.
Go ahead.
I’ll be all right.
Can’t you see I’m perfectly calm?
Like the pulse of a corpse.
Remember?
You used to say:
“Jack London,
money,
love,
passion,”
but all I could see
was you—La Gioconda
whom someone was bound to steal.
And did.
His revenge would be terrible. “Remember! Pompeii perished when they mocked Vesuvius.” But of course Pompeii was doomed in any case. Like Sverdlov and Osinsky, Mayakovsky had known all along that there would be earthquakes and famines, and that brother would betray brother to death, and children would rebel against their parents and have them put to death, and the sun would be darkened, and the moon would not give its light, and the stars would fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies would be shaken. Like Sverdlov and Osinsky, Mayakovsky connected a doomed love to a doomed world. Impossible loves were but reminders of impossible lives. The days of distress were but signs of the prophet’s election and the world’s violent end.
I,
mocked and cast aside,
like an endless
dirty joke,
can see through the mountains of time
him
whom no one else can see.
There,
beyond the scope of feeble vision,
at the head of the hungry hordes,
in its thorny crown of revolutions,
strides the year
1916.
I am his John the Baptist;
I am where the pain is—
everywhere;
in each drop of the tear stream
I nailed myself to the cross.
It’s too late for forgiveness,
I’ve burned the souls that nurtured compassion.
And that is much harder than taking
a hundred million Bastilles!
And when,
with rebellion
his advent heralding,
you step forth to greet your savior,
I’ll rip out
my soul,
stomp on it,
make it big,
and hand it to you—
all bloodied, for a banner.
But no, it is he, the “spat-upon Calvarian,” who is the Savior. His Maria is Mary, the Mother of God, and he is, “maybe, the most beautiful of her sons.”
In Heaven, he asks God his Father to build a merry-go-round on the tree of knowledge of good and evil and offers to bring in the best-looking Eves from the city’s back alleys.108
Not interested?
Shaking your shaggy head?
Giving me the big frown?
You don’t really think
that creep with the wings
standing behind you
knows the meaning of love?
. . . . . . . . . . .
You, the almighty,
came up with a pair of hands,
made sure everyone got a head,
so why couldn’t you come up with a way
for us to kiss and kiss and kiss
without this torture?
I thought you were really powerful, a god almighty
but you’re just a drop-out, a puny little godlet.
Look, I’m bending down
to pull out a cobbler’s knife
from inside my boot.
Winged scoundrels!
Cringe in your paradise
Ruffle your feathers as you tremble in fright!
And you, the one with the incense breath,
I’ll split you open from here to Alaska!
Heaven would be exposed for the joke it is, but—as in the original Revelation—the last and decisive slaughter would take place on earth. The hungry would crawl out of the swamp, and the well-fed—Voronsky’s “driveling, hiccuping, lip-smacking” meat-market butchers—would hang in place of the bloody carcasses. The theft of La Gioconda would be avenged.
Come on, y
ou
meek, sweaty little starvelings
festering in your flea-ridden muck!
Let’s turn Mondays and Tuesdays
into holidays
by dipping them in blood!
Let the Earth, at knifepoint, think again
about whom it has chosen to pick on!
The Earth,
grown fat,
like Rothschild’s lover,
used up and left to rot.
Let the flags flap in the heat of the gunfire
The way they do on any decent holiday—
And you, lampposts, hoist up
the shopkeepers’
bloody carcasses.
I outswore,
outbegged,
outstabbed myself,
sank my teeth into someone’s flesh.
The sunset, red as the Marseillaise,
Shuddered as it breathed its last.109
3
THE FAITH
The most obvious question about Sverdlov’s, Osinsky’s and Mayakovsky’s luminous faith is whether it is a religion. The most sensible answer is that it does not matter.
There are two principal approaches to defining religion: the substantive (what religion is) and the functional (what religion does). According to Steve Bruce’s deliberately conventional version of the former, religion “consists of beliefs, actions, and institutions which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of action, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose. Such a formulation seems to encompass what ordinary people mean when they talk about religion.” The question, then, is whether the Marxist drama of universal degradation and salvation (preordained, independent of human will, and incapable of falsifiable verification) is an impersonal process possessed of moral purpose and whether communism as the end of recognizable human existence (all conflicts resolved, all needs satisfied, all of history’s work done) is in some sense “supernatural.” The usual answer is no: because the Marxist prediction is meant to be rational and this-worldly; because the “supernatural” is usually defined in opposition to reason; because “ordinary people” don’t think of Marxism as a religion; and because the whole point of using the conventional definition is to exclude Marxism and other beliefs that assume the nonexistence of supernatural (science-defying) entities.1
The House of Government Page 10