Copyright 2002 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.  
The New Yorker
January 7, 2002
SECTION: LIFE AND LETTERS; Pg. 38

LENGTH: 11747 words

HEADLINE: MAYAKOVSKY'S LAST LOVES;
The poet's muse was in Moscow. Then he met a young emigree in Paris.

BYLINE: FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY

BODY:
There's no way you can miss him if you spend a day or more in Moscow, for his site, about a mile up from the Kremlin, is as central to Moscow as Rockefeller Center is to Manhattan. For more than forty years, a bronze statue of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, the Russian Revolution's most celebrated poet, has towered over the square named after him: his massive torso triumphantly arched, an imaginary wind billowing the folds of his baggy pants, he incarnates Soviet man at his most optimistic and confident, striding toward the greatest future ever devised for humankind.

Mayakovsky's statue is one of two major landmarks on Moscow's Tverskaya Street-formerly Gorky Street, for those who haven't been to Moscow since the renaming charade that began in the early nineties. It is the central artery that runs from Red Square to the Belorussky Station, and it is fitting that the only other major landmark on this thoroughfare is Pushkin Square, for Mayakovsky and Pushkin may well be the two poets most commonly memorized by Russian high-school students born after the Second World War. Never mind the dissonance between the aggressively self-assured Marxist hero embodied in the statue and Mayakovsky the man, a notoriously unbalanced genius who took his own life in 1930, at the age of thirty-six. Russian culture has always excelled at mythification, and in the long run the political gaucheness of this un-Socialist act had no more effect on the national cult of Mayakovsky than Pushkin's idiotic final duel over the honor of his foolish wife had on his.

In this nation where public poetry readings can draw thousands of listeners, the recitation of poetry is a cherished national pastime. Ask most Russian adults which verses of Mayakovsky they learned by heart in school, and, as surely as they know dozens of lines from Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," they will spout stanzas from stirring patriotic works such as Mayakovsky's "Khorosho" ("Very Good"), "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin," and "Left March." Or, if they're under twenty-five and attended high school after the upheavals of 1991, they learned Mayakovsky's romantic lyrics, which began to replace his patriotic poems in school curricula. They might memorize love poems such as "Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love," or, as I heard a seventeen-year-old recite in a bar in Moscow last year, "Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva." These are poems I cannot listen to without considerable emotion, for the woman to whom they were dedicated-whom Mayakovsky courted in Paris when she was a beautiful emigree of twenty-two-was my mother.

From my adolescence on, I was aware that my mother was not only one of Mayakovsky's muses but his last great love, and that, somewhere in her possession, there was a cache of letters he had written her during their romance. But I was equally aware of my mother's extremely secretive, prudish nature, and of her profound reluctance to talk about any painful aspect of her private life. Until her death, in 1991, I responded by honoring the chill silence she cast over the poet who was a central figure of her youth-in part because of my own fear of confronting the past, and in part because, like many mothers and daughters, we lived in terror of each other.

No one protected my mother's secretiveness more fiercely than my stepfather, Alexander Liberman, the artist and publishing executive, who had been passionately in love with her for fifty years. Even though my mother had willed me all her Mayakovsky letters and documents, for eight years after her death my stepfather declined to give them to me. "Can't you see I'm too sick to think of such things?" he'd say, or "I'm too tired to remember where they are." 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.

Then, in the summer of 1999, the Mayakovsky Museum, in Moscow, informed me that it owned a large archive of letters from my mother to her own mother, who had died in 1963, having never left Russia. Sadly, my grandmother's side of the correspondence hadn't 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 its guest while I studied this Tatiana Yakovleva Archive. But I knew that to make sense of these letters I must first retrieve and read the Mayakovsky letters my mother had left me in her will.

I went to see my stepfather at his Manhattan apartment the evening before he was scheduled to be flown to his other home, in Florida. He was eighty-six years old, heavily medicated, and very ill. As I sat at his bedside, I asked him once more if he could tell me where the letters were. His wasted silvery head lolled in various directions, as if scanning the room. "Oh, somewhere here," he said vaguely. "You should have them." With these words his eyes closed, and he fell into a deep sleep. I went home to Connecticut, but upon the counsel of my husband and a close friend I returned to my stepfather's apartment a few days later and started looking through foot-high stacks of envelopes in a corner of his bedroom. 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-five telegrams, and some original manuscripts of his poems.

Several months later, with photocopies of these documents under my arm, I arrived at the genteel, antiquated premises of the Mayakovsky Museum, where I was greeted like a long-lost daughter. And there, in the letters that the young Tatiana Yakovleva had written to her mother more than seventy years ago, I was reunited with my mother with an intensity that often brought me to tears. However, I must return to the poet at the center of my search, whose work I'd long known and admired, but to whom I now felt a far more intimate connection.

The youngest of three children, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in western Georgia, in a small village called Bagdati. His father, a member of the impoverished Russian gentry, supported his family by working as a forest ranger. In 1901, the family left for the larger town of Kutaisi in order that young Vladimir-Volodia to his family-might attend a proper school. Moody, restless, quick-tempered, absorbed in books, the boy displayed an extraordinary precocity for politics. At the age of twelve, in the tumult of the 1905 Revolution, he began to steal his father's shotguns to deliver them to local revolutionary parties.

The following year, after his father died of blood poisoning-caused by a cut incurred while filing papers-Volodia moved to Moscow with his mother and two older sisters, Ludmila and Olga. The family lived on the edge of starvation, and it was there that Mayakovsky began to work with the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, whose radical wing was known as the Bolsheviks. By the age of fourteen, he was a full-fledged member of that party, with the nom de guerre of Comrade Konstantin. At fifteen, having aided in the escape of a group of women prisoners, he spent nearly a year in a Moscow jail cell, where he read Shakespeare, Byron, Tolstoy, and other classics, and began to write poetry.

His aspirations at the time were also in the visual arts, and the year after he left prison he entered the Institute for the Study of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, living in such penury that he limited his diet to two inches of sausage a day in order not to burden his family. It was at art school that the brooding, emaciated young artist met the man who became his first patron, David Burliuk, a wealthy young Ukrainian painter and poet with whom Mayakovsky pioneered the Russian Futurist movement.

Russian Futurism was born of the intellectual ferment that followed the abortive revolution of 1905. Beyond finding aesthetic forms appropriate to the machine age, it aimed above all to shock and offend bourgeois sensibility. Its manifesto, drawn up in 1912 by Burliuk, Mayakovsky, and two colleagues, and named "A Slap to the Public's Taste," called on all artists to "throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc. etc. overboard from the Steamship of modernity." One of the Futurists' tactics was to travel all through Russia disrupting cultural events-concerts, art exhibits, poetry readings-with their sheer impudence and extravagance. Their faces painted with weird landscapes, their bodies tinted white from head to toe and attired in bizarre costumes, the Futurists broke up gatherings by shouting, snorting, declaiming nonsense verse, or reading avant-garde texts such as Mayakovsky's "The Cloud in Trousers" (1915), which had made him a succes de scandale in the Russian art world.

By the time he was twenty-two, in 1915, the flamboyant, garrulous Mayakovsky had become a celebrity. (Maxim Gorky was "so deeply touched" by "The Cloud in Trousers" that he wept on Mayakovsky's vest.) And he had developed a persona that would change little in the course of his life. Mayakovsky was over six feet tall, with a large, square jaw and the body of a football player. He had a booming street heckler's voice and, in his innumerable public appearances, argued insolently with those who challenged his ideas. Boris Pasternak, who instantly fell under the brawling young poet's spell, dramatizes him as "a handsome youth of gloomy aspect with the bass voice of a deacon and the fist of a pugilist," who "sat in a chair as on the saddle of a motorcycle" and generally reminded him of a "young terrorist conspirator, a composite image of the minor provincial characters in Dostoyevsky's novels."

But another colleague, the novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, describes Mayakovsky's eyes as those of both an "athlete and dreamer," and the poet's ferocious aura was indeed laced with a strain of great tenderness. He was a devoted son and brother, he acted toward all women with surprising courtliness, and he displayed legendary warmth and generosity toward persons of modest means or character. The reclusive Dmitri Shostakovich, who composed the music for Mayakovsky's most famous play, "The Bedbug," was struck by the poet's gentleness and "simple good manners."

He was also filled with persecution complexes, and his neediness occasionally made his presence insufferable. He dreaded solitude and was intensely jealous and demanding, wanting his friends' undivided attention around the clock, despondent when a comrade was unable to play chess with him on the evenings he wished. At a poetry reading in 1918 during which some of his most distinguished peers-Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Andrei Bely-expressed considerable enthusiasm for his verse, one stranger's coolly polite remark sent him into a deep depression. Mayakovsky boasted that he had "an elephant's hide," but in reality, as Ehrenburg summed him up, "he lived without so much as ordinary human skin."

Other idiosyncrasies of Mayakovsky's character included a passion for gambling and a hypochondriac's compulsion about physical hygiene-the latter trait a result, perhaps, of his father's fatal blood infection. He never touched doorknobs without a handkerchief, always carried a metal soap dish in his pocket, and travelled everywhere with a large folding rubber tub. Ehrenburg remembers him sipping all drinks, whether White Horse whiskey or hot coffee, through a straw, even in the most luxurious restaurants and bars.

Mayakovsky's poetry accorded with his character. His imagery was apocalyptic, deliberately coarse and violent, as if presaging the cataclysmic changes that would affect Russia in 1917. In "The Cloud in Trousers," words jump into the poet's mind "like a naked prostitute from a burning brothel," the stroke of twelve falls "like a head from a block." Perhaps the most radical innovator in the history of Russian poetry, he attacked the hieratic dignity of Russian verse by stripping it of all traditional poetic diction and enriching it with shards of popular ditties, folk sayings, puns, commercial jingles, and irreverent rhyming schemes. Equally revolutionary in his use of prosody, he favored accentual verse over the syllabic-accentual meter of nineteenth-century poetry, and he often broke up his lines into step patterns to indicate the pauses for breath the reader should make when reading his poems aloud. (Throughout this text, I have made minor changes to the translations of George Reavey, Max Hayward, and Herbert Marshall.) An example from his "Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry," in which he affirms the political power of verse:

The line

is a fuse.

The line burns to the end

and explodes,

and the town

is blown sky-high

in a strophe . . .

The working class

speaks

through my mouth,

and we,

proletarians,

are drivers of the pen.

These innovations, and the poet's penchant for gigantism, created a hortatory art ideally suited to the immense audiences and vast public spaces that characterized Russian cultural gatherings in the revolutionary decades. However, there were two Mayakovskys. His patriotic odes expressed his rapturous joy in the violent transformation of society and his pride in the new Soviet regime; but the principal themes of his lyric poems were those of unrequited love, solitude, and self-destruction. ("I am as lonely as the only eye / of a man on his way to the blind!"; "The heart yearns for a bullet / while the throat raves of a razor.")

There was a strong streak of masochism in Mayakovsky, and the woman he fell in love with in 1915 seems to have been invented to satisfy it. Her name was Lilia (Lili) Yurevna Brik, nee Kagan, and she would serve as his muse longer than any other woman.

The daughter of a prosperous Jewish jurist, the handsome, erotically obsessed, highly cultivated Lili grew up with an overwhelming ambition particularly prevalent among women of the Russian intelligentsia: she dreamed of being perpetuated in human memory as the muse of a famous poet. When she was twenty, she married Osip Brik, the learned son of a wealthy jeweller whose politics, like hers, were ardently Marxist. The two made a pact to love each other "in the Chernyshevsky manner," a reference to one of nineteenth-century Russia's most radical thinkers, an early advocate of "open" marriages. Living at the heart of artistic bohemia and receiving the intelligentsia in the salon of his delectable, red-haired wife, Osip Brik, true to his promise, calmly accepted Lili's infidelities from the start. In fact, upon hearing his wife confess that she had gone to bed with Mayakovsky, Osip exclaimed, "How could you refuse anything to that man!"

Mayakovsky's sexual relationship with Lili lasted only from approximately 1915 to 1923. But his close friendship with Osip, a noted literary scholar and a pioneer of formalist criticism, created a bond with both Briks that transcended any sexual attachment. For the rest of his life, "Osia" Brik would remain the poet's most trusted adviser, his most fervent proselytizer, and also a co-founder, with Mayakovsky, of the most dynamic avant-garde journal of the early Soviet era, Left Front of Art, which published artists and writers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Isaac Babel. In 1918, when Mayakovsky and the Briks became inseparable, he simply moved in with them; throughout the rest of his life, he made his home at a succession of flats that the Briks occupied. He also had a tiny studio a half-hour's walk away, next to the Lubianka prison, where he worked and carried on his numerous liaisons with other women.

Osip Brik enjoyed his own occasional flings, and the menage a trois seemed to prosper on these arrangements. The two men rose ahead of Lili in the mornings, and had long conversations over breakfast. Before leaving the flat, Mayakovsky came up to Osip and kissed him on the top of the head, saying, "I kiss your little baldness." The Briks offered Mayakovsky both independence and the stability of a family life, which he had not enjoyed since childhood. In return, the poet became the Briks' principal breadwinner; the substantial publishing royalties and lecture fees he earned in Russia and abroad supplemented the meagre income the Briks earned through literary criticism and occasional work that Lili found in films. (This financial arrangement continued until the end of Mayakovsky's life, and led the poet's possessive, conservative older sister Ludmila to bear a lifelong grudge against Lili.)

Mayakovsky's liaison with Lili, however, was as tormented as his friendship with Osip Brik was serene. Mutual friends remained amazed, throughout the following years, by the despotic manner in which she treated him and the fearful obsequiousness with which this seemingly powerful man catered to his mistress's every wish. ("If I'm a complete rag, use me to dust your staircase," he wrote her in one particularly self-abasing letter.) For years, with her tacit approval, his poems publicly lamented her heartlessness and inconstancy-in "The Backbone Flute," of 1915, he likens her rouged lips to "a monastery hacked from frigid rock." The poet's unrequited passion for Lili even incited him to flirt with death, in 1916, by playing Russian roulette.

Mayakovsky's self-sacrificing impulses were mirrored in his politics. In October of 1917, he settled into the Revolution with greater enthusiasm than any other Russian writer of his stature. "To accept or not to accept? For me . . . this question never arose," he wrote. "It is my Revolution." For some years, repressing the expression of personal emotions, he celebrated, in rabble-rousing verse purged of Futurist excesses, the building of dams and factories, the lyricism of Soviet industrial machinery. "But now's no time / for a lover and his lass," he wrote. "All / my ringing poetic power / I give to you, attacking class." As a protege of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Education, Mayakovsky was sent to lecture all over the Soviet Union to proselytize for the regime. This drumbeater of the Revolution was particularly adored by factory workers and younger audiences, and could draw thousands to his readings. And he is credited for having played an important role in rallying the Russian people to Bolshevism.

Beginning in 1919, during the civil war, he also used his considerable skills as a graphic artist to create governmental propaganda posters for which he devised both the design and the text, sometimes churning out several posters a day. His popular commercial jingles-he wrote hundreds of them in a single year-promoted state-manufactured macaroni products, candies, galoshes, tires: "Clothe the body, feed the stomach, fill the mind / Everything man needs at the GUM" (the government-owned department store on Red Square) "he will find," or "The best pacifiers ever sold / He'll suck on them till he's very old."

In 1924, Mayakovsky produced a three-thousand-line poem, commemorating the passing of Lenin, which was greeted with ovations wherever he read it. ("The genuine, / wise, / human, / tremendous / Lenin . . . Yet wouldn't I, / who rarely / came close to him, / give / my own life, / in a stupor of ecstasy, / for one little breath / of his?") Throughout the nineteen-twenties, Mayakovsky was also sent to numerous foreign countries to propagandize his nation's achievements. In 1925, he even travelled to the United States, where he remained for several months and fathered a daughter by an American woman of Russian-German descent, Elly Jones.

But the frantic pace of the poet's patriotic activities, the tensions between his private and public personae, and the suppression of his selfhood for the greater glory of Communism took their toll in deepening depressions. By the mid-twenties, his odes to the regime were beginning to display an alarmingly masochistic servility. ("At such a time / what foolish blockhead / will rave / the word / 'Democracy'?! / . . . an iron dictatorship-/ is the key to victory." "I want, / at the shift's end, / the Factory Committee / to shut my lips / with a padlock and key.") Increasingly, he realized that by channelling all his energies into the Revolution he was threatening to ruin his monumental talent.

Furthermore, like all cult figures, he was inciting as much envy and resentment as admiration. From the mid-twenties on, the more doctrinaire Communists, whose power was growing in literary circles, began to criticize Mayakovsky for his "bourgeois individualism," and this hostility only deepened his despondency. "Only a very great, true love might still save me," he told his close friend Roman Jakobson, who later became a preeminent literary critic. Jakobson looks on 1928, when Mayakovsky met Tatiana Yakovleva in Paris, as a pivotal year in which the poet "broke," when "living alone had become intolerable to him, when he felt the need for an enormous change."

By 1928, Lili Brik's younger sister, Elsa Triolet-a shrewd, winsome emigre writer who was devoted to her sibling-had been living in Paris for eight years. Since Mayakovsky's first trip to France, in 1922, she had acted as Lili's Paris spy, reporting on the poet's romantic escapades. But his foreign affairs did not give the sisters much cause for alarm until October of 1928, when he set off for Nice to see Elly Jones, his former American lover. She had brought the daughter she bore him, now two years old, for a first visit with her father. Brik and Triolet were alarmed by the trip, and fearful that the poet might be persuaded to follow mother and child to the United States. To distract him from the American menace, Elsa decided to introduce Volodia to a beautiful, bright young Russian emigree of her acquaintance-my mother. On October 25th, the very day of his return from Nice, Elsa took the poet to visit a Paris internist who had close links to the emigre community. She had learned from the doctor's wife that Tatiana Yakovleva had an appointment with him that morning.

The sisters' scheming misfired. Volodia took one look at Yakovleva and fell head over heels in love with her. Upon one of the few occasions my mother mentioned Mayakovsky to me, she said that he insisted on taking her home from the doctor's in a cab, spread his coat over her knees to keep her warm, and, after depositing her at her front door, fell on his knees to declare his love. "Yes, on his knees on the sidewalk," my mother would reiterate when telling the story, "and it wasn't even lunchtime yet."

Tatiana Yakovleva, thirteen years Mayakovsky's junior, was born in St. Petersburg in 1906, the offspring of several generations of somewhat eccentric artists and intellectuals. Her father, Alexei Evgenevich Yakovlev, was an engineer and architect who was one of the first persons in Russia to own a private plane (its name was Mademoiselle). Her paternal grandmother was one of the first women in Russia to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her mother, who helped to support the family during the Revolution by teaching ballet, spoke four languages with little accent. When Tatiana was five or so, she moved with her parents, her younger sister, Ludmila, and several governesses and other domestics to the town of Penza, a thirteen-hour train ride southeast of Moscow, where her father had been commissioned to design a network of state theatres.

Life soon grew difficult for the Yakovlev girls. In 1915, their parents divorced; their father left for America via China, and their mother was remarried to a prosperous pharmaceutical manufacturer who lost all his money at the onset of the 1917 Revolution. The family was left destitute, and their survival grew all the more precarious in 1921, when famine affected southeastern Russia with particular savagery and Tatiana's stepfather died of tuberculosis and malnutrition. The three women lived in one room, burning precious books for fuel. My mother remembered spending those days making the rounds of open-air markets and thrift shops to sell whatever furniture and linens remained in the household. Notwithstanding an extremely limited formal education-owing to the Revolution, she had little schooling after the age of twelve-she had a remarkable talent for memorizing poetry, a skill whose honored status the Revolution never altered. By the age of fourteen, she could recite from memory hundreds of lines of Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, and, of course, Mayakovsky. In the early twenties, she helped her mother and sister to survive the famine by standing on street corners reciting poetry for groups of Red Army soldiers and receiving hunks of bread from them in return.

In 1928, when Mayakovsky met her in Paris, Tatiana had just recovered from a serious case of tuberculosis. Tall, blond, animated, industrious, vain, extremely snobbish in her adulation of both nobility and intellectual achievement, she was living with three loving relatives who had emigrated to Paris in the early nineteen-twenties: her paternal grandmother, the retired mathematician; her aunt, an opera singer; and her uncle, the painter Alexandre Iacovleff. In 1925, they had managed to get Tatiana a visa to France on medical grounds. As soon as her health improved, she began to contribute to their modest household finances by working as an apprentice to a hat designer. Tatiana loved high fashion and was skilled at making a bit of rabbit skin and fake beads look like something out of Vogue; she had won many hearts in Paris, and led a busy social life, but she was determined to keep her virginity until marriage.

She missed her homeland dreadfully. "I Love Love Love Russia," she had written to her mother the year before she met Mayakovsky. "Paris may be the dream spot of the world, but I'm only a guest here and nothing will ever take the place of my native land, which I so love and treasure and revere." The poet allayed her homesickness: their mutual attraction was so powerful that, from the moment they met until Mayakovsky's visa expired, in early December, they saw each other every day.

Tatiana, who was severely chaperoned by her rabidly anti-Communist relatives, had to do a lot of fibbing to carry on her courtship with the Soviet poet. Lying outrageously to her doting babushka, she enlisted a few loyal friends to say she was going to their house. "Babushka would have had a heart attack if she'd learned whom I was dining with every night," she recalled fifty years later, emphasizing the sacrifices her relatives had made to get her to Paris. "The Bolshevik and her granddaughter, smuggled with great difficulty out of a starving Russia turned into hell by the Revolution!"

But Bolshevism didn't seem to pose a problem for the lovers in the nostalgic landscape of Paris's emigre community. Tatiana's anti-Communist scruples were apparently absolved by the narcissistic pleasure she took in the love of a famous poet; Mayakovsky seems not to have spoken of world events to her. And his infatuation only deepened when he discovered Tatiana's extraordinary knowledge of Russian poetry. Sitting with him at the various cafes they frequented-La Coupole, Le Voltaire, La Rotonde, Le Dome, La Closerie des Lilas-she recited poetry by the hour. How could he not have been seduced when he heard her speak out the whole of his own "The Cloud in Trousers"-some seven hundred lines? He told all his friends that Tatiana had "absolute pitch" for poetry. She became his confidante, as Lili had been for years. He informed her of the nature of his relationship with the Briks, and she seemed to take it in stride. She even helped him to find a dress for Lili and to purchase a four-cylinder gray Renault that Lili had asked him to bring back for her from Paris.

The poet proposed marriage within two weeks, a suggestion that Tatiana seems to have received in a mood of cool noncommittal. Over a lunch at the Grande-Chaumiere, in Montparnasse, during those November weeks, he presented her with two poems he had composed during the past days and had dedicated to her. They were written in a neat, slanting hand in a small green notebook, which I now own. One was called "Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love," the other "Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva." A sample line from the first one, which recalled their meeting in the doctor's office:

Picture this:

a beauty

all framed in furs

and beads,

enters a drawing room.

I

seized this beauty

and said:

-did I speak right

or wrong?-

Comrade,

I come from Russia;

I am famous in

my land;

"Comrade Kostrov"-the first poem he had ever dedicated to any woman other than Lili Brik-was the most passionate love lyric Mayakovsky had written in years. And it intimated that he had found that "very great, true love" which, as he'd told Roman Jakobson, might yet save him:

To love

means this:

to run

into the depths of a yard

and, till the rook-black night,

chop wood

with a shining axe. . . .

to us

love

tells us, humming,

that the stalled engine

of the heart

has started to work

again.

"Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva" was even more explicit, urging her, in no uncertain terms, to return to Moscow with him:

Come to the crossroads

of my big

and clumsy arms. . . .

In one way or another

I'll take

you

by yourself

or along with Paris.

The couple were both striking in their statuesque beauty, their magnetic, powerful presence. Beyond their passion for poetry, they shared many predilections and character traits, chief among which was their generosity, their narcissism, and the exhibitionism with which they each cloaked their shyness and deep insecurities. As Tatiana introduced Mayakovsky to her French and emigre acquaintances-who included Cocteau and Prokofiev-the couple's increasingly public romance was not lost on Lili's sister, Elsa, who lived in the same Montparnasse hotel as the poet and was beginning a lifelong relationship with the French writer Louis Aragon. Back in Moscow, Lili fretted, informed of Paris events by Elsa (and perhaps also by the secret police, which already thought of all important Soviet travellers abroad as potential defectors and kept close track of them). "Who is that woman Volodia is crazy about . . . to whom he's writing poems (!!) . . . and who is said to faint when she hears the word 'merde'?" Lili wrote her sister, referring to Tatiana's notorious puritanical streak.

Lili would find out soon enough. Mayakovsky's visa was to expire in early December, and he had no choice but to go back to Moscow. Although he was scheduled to return to Paris in May, after the first run of his play "The Bedbug," his separation from Tatiana seems to have been extremely sorrowful. Before leaving Paris, Mayakovsky went to a florist's and ordered that a dozen roses be sent to her every Sunday until his return; every bouquet was accompanied by his visiting card, each one bearing a different message.

In the first of many letters my mother wrote to her mother from Paris about Mayakovsky, which have never been fully published in English, Tatiana's grief at her separation from Mayakovsky is mitigated by a naive pride at being his new muse. "He's a remarkable man, totally different from the way I'd imagined him to be," she wrote shortly after the poet's departure. "He's wonderful to me, and it was a great drama for him to leave here for at least six months. He telephoned me from Berlin, and it was one shout of pain. I receive a telegram every day, and flowers every week. . . . Our entire house is filled with flowers. . . . I felt extremely sad when he left. He's the most talented person I've ever met. . . . I think you'd be interested in hearing the poems 'Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva,' and 'Letter on Love.' "

She felt all the more drawn to Mayakovsky because he reminded her so poignantly of Russia. "When I was with him I felt I was in Russia, and since his departure, I long even more for Russia. But all of this I write to [you], my mamulen'ka, and to no one else. He left me two copies of 'my' poems, I'm sending you one. For the time being don't show these [poems] to anyone. They'll be published soon. When he read them here they had a colossal success. They belong to his very best lyrical work."

Some time later, in response to a letter from her mother, she continues to flourish her status as the poet's muse:

Mayakovsky was writing to Tatiana with equal fervor. It was in his Futurist temperament to prefer telegrams to letters-they got there faster-and he sent her at least one a week. "Write more often got your letters am writing miss you incredibly love you kiss you your Vol," one of his cables of that season read. "Received your letter thank you sent you letter books," went another. "Have a cold miss you love you kiss you my own Vol." As for the letters, they came every few weeks. The first of them was begun on December 24th, a few weeks after his return to Moscow.

The next lines communicate his insistence that she return with him to Moscow. Mayakovsky, however, seems to be aware that Soviet censors may be perusing his correspondence with an emigree, and his references to marriage are oblique and often coded:

Mayakovsky was usually honest with his women. Upon returning to Moscow, he had confirmed Lili's suspicions about the beautiful Russian emigree and read her his "Tatiana poems." "You've deceived me for the first time," Lili said, furious that he had defied her long-held resolve to be his one and only muse. A short time later, he told her over dinner at the flat they shared that he wished to marry Tatiana and bring her back to Russia. Lili responded by smashing a precious piece of china.

Mayakovsky's second letter to my mother, written on New Year's Eve of 1929, alludes to Lili's fierce jealousy:

Sweet Tanik, my beloved . . .

I don't like it without you. Think about it and collect your thoughts (and then your belongings) and adjust your heart to my hope-to take you in my paws and bring you to us, to me in Moscow. Let's think about it and then talk. Let's make our separation a test.

If we love each other, is it good to exhaust heart and time working through the telegraphic poles?

It is the 31st now at 12 midnight and . . . I'm totally saturated with melancholy longing. Tender comrade, I clinked glasses and proposed a toast to you, and Lilia Yurevna chided me, "If you're suffering so, why not immediately run to her?" Well, I shall run to you, but for the time being I must press on with my work. I work until my eyes get blurry and my shoulders crack. . . . When I'm totally exhausted I say the word "Tatiana" and return to my paper. You and the other sun, you will later comfort me. . . .

To work and to wait for you is my only joy.

Love, love me absolutely, please. I hug and love and kiss you.

Vol

(This diminutive of Volodia was a play on words. In Russian, vol means "ox," an animal with which the poet particularly identified, and in whose semblance he often caricatured himself in his letters and greeting cards. )

Lili Brik was not the only person worried about the romance. Stalin had come to absolute power at the end of 1928 and had immediately tightened government control of the press. The poem Mayakovsky had dedicated to Tatiana, "Letter to Comrade Kostrov," came under severe critical censure when it was published. What kind of bourgeois decadence had the poet fallen into, celebrating the beauty of an emigree "framed in furs and beads"! Even my grandmother seems to have expressed concern about the romance, for the tone in which Tatiana wrote her a month after Volodia's return to Russia was highly defensive:

The young woman enjoyed flaunting her success to her mother. But she was also torn by two conflicting emotions-the pleasure she took in her safe, glamorous Paris life and her temptation to return to suffering Russia, and the loved ones who remained there:

Then comes the first intimation that Tatiana, unbeknownst even to her closest confidante-her own mother-is furtively keeping a few Parisian men on the back burner who might offer her a comfortable high-society marriage. "Furthermore I'm living through all kinds of dramas," she writes her mamulen'ka, "there are two other suitors, it's a vicious magical circle."

As for Volodia, seemingly unconcerned with the criticism of his "Comrade Kostrov" poem, he rushed back to Tatiana on February 14th, three months earlier than he had promised, not even waiting for the reviews of "The Bedbug." The lovers' reunion seems to have been as idyllic as their first meeting. They again saw each other daily, and even travelled a bit together, going to Le Touquet for a weekend. He wrote more poems to Tatiana-short ones this time, in a style parodic of nineteenth-century verse, which he signed "Marquis WM" (a teasing allusion to her fondness for titles). My mother detected a change in him. "He did not criticize Russia directly," she recollected a half century later, "but he was obviously disillusioned." This impression coincides with the recollections of a Russian friend with whom the poet spent an evening during a brief, financially disastrous gambling trip to Nice, and before whom he broke into sobs, saying, "I've already stopped being a poet. . . . Now I'm a . . . functionary."

In April, Mayakovsky's visa ran out once more, and he was forced to return to Moscow. The couple decided to meet again in Paris in October, when Tatiana would make up her mind about marrying him. She had given him a Waterman pen as a going-away present. Their farewell lunch, held at the Grande-Chaumiere the day of his departure with a group of their mutual friends, had the aura of an engagement party.

The first surviving letter of Mayakovsky's after his return to Russia is dated May 15th, and seems to address some pique she had expressed toward him:

A few lines follow in which he sums up the strikingly generous arrangements he intended to make for her mother-a prodigality that was not lost on Tatiana-and informs her that he's soon going off on a lecture tour of the Crimea. The letter continues:

Another letter came in June. This time, Tatiana seems to have complained that he was sending her more telegrams than letters:

I jump into work, remembering that until October there isn't that much time. . . . My lovely, own Tanik don't forget me because I love you so much, and I'm so longing to see you. I kiss all of you, your Vol.

Write to me!!!

By the end of that month, both of them are complaining that they aren't receiving any letters. And one is led to wonder to what degree Russian security services might have blocked the correspondence between the Soviet Union's poet laureate and his emigre love. One also wonders whether Lili Brik, who had full access to his studio on Lubiansky Passage, might have intercepted his mail.

Tatiana's longing, that summer of 1929, seems to have been as deep as the poet's. "Write me and let me know his mood and how he looks, I long for him terribly," she writes in July to her sister, Ludmila, a destitute aspiring actress in Moscow. At around the same time, in a letter to her mother, she refers to the magnanimous way in which Mayakovsky was continuing to provide for her relatives in Russia. (Upon Tatiana's request, he had brought clothes for her sister and sent her some money.) Now he had organized a trip to the Crimea for her ailing mother, which, to Tatiana's sorrow, her mother had initially declined, probably out of pride:

V.V. also wrote me a sad letter; he had hoped . . . to arrange this for you. After all, the best thing that he can do for me (during such a long absence) is to look after you and Liloshka. . . . And it is this attribute of his that I particularly treasure; a limitless kindness and concern. I await his arrival in the autumn with great joy. There aren't other people of his calibre here. In his relationship to women in general, and to me in particular, he is an absolute gentleman.

"Absolute gentleman" would remain an all-important phrase in my mother's vocabulary until her death. On the rare occasions she talked about Mayakovsky, she unfailingly stated that he was "a man of irresistible charm and sex appeal," with "a rare sense of humor," a man, moreover, who was "extraordinarily careful about my virginity," as she primly put it. His "exquisite" manners, his "tenderness and concern" for her, his elegance and perfect taste in clothes ("he reminded one more of an English aristocrat than a Bolshevik poet") made him the most "absolute gentleman" my mother had ever met. But there's no way of knowing whether she would have retained that opinion of the poet if she'd known of the life he led in Moscow after his return from Paris.

Throughout the thirteen years that Mayakovsky and the Briks had shared a home, Lili-who went through many men a year-tolerated the poet's affairs, even approved of them, as long as they remained lighthearted. But Volodia supported the Briks, and his marriage would have threatened their financial stability. There was also Lili's determination to remain the unrepeatable love of a great poet's life. So, in the spring of 1929, once Tatiana Yakovleva had entered into Mayakovsky's poetry, Lili realized that she was dealing with her most serious rival to date. Seven months earlier, she had mobilized her sister to counteract the threat of the American girl. This time, she turned to her husband to make the decisive move.

In May of 1929, within two weeks of Mayakovsky's return from Paris, Veronika (Nora) Polonskaya, a pretty twenty-one-year-old actress of the prestigious Moscow Arts Theatre, received a call from Osip Brik. Polonskaya, a pert, dimpled blonde who was married to a popular older actor of that company and was just beginning to rise in its lower ranks, was somewhat surprised to hear from Brik, with whom she had only a brief acquaintance. He was proposing an outing to the horse races with Vladimir Mayakovsky on the following day-would she join them? Nora, like many married women in Russian intellectual circles at the time, seemed to lead a very independent life. She accepted.

Lili had been on target: Volodia began to pursue Nora relentlessly. Although she was initially put off by his brusqueness, upon their first tete-a-tete the young woman was taken by his "gentle, delicate" manner, and by his commitment to Bolshevik principles. Soon "Norochka" was returning the poet's infatuation, and coming to his studio on Lubiansky Passage every day.

As I read through Nora Polonskaya's memoirs at the Mayakovsky Museum earlier this year, I was, for the first time, rather confused by the state of the poet's emotions. After all, this was a man renowned for his sincerity and forthrightness, a man who had never been dishonest or duplicitous with any woman, or, for that matter, with any male comrade. By this stage of my research, I had grown very fond of Vladimir Vladimirovich, and I tended to invent excuses for him whenever his conduct was questionable. Well, I rationalized on this occasion, Volodia needed some immediate satisfaction and consolation; my mother would probably not have tolerated the truth, and there was a romantic streak in him which wished to preserve the purity of their romance from being sullied by that truth. But his affair with Polonskaya was made all the more perplexing by the ardor of a letter he wrote to Tatiana on July 12, 1929, just before he left for his lecture tour of the Crimea, where he planned to meet with Nora:

Tanik, I've begun to miss you terribly, terribly. You must notice yourself that you almost do not write to me. Does it bore you?

My own beloved Tanik, don't forget that you and I are rodnye [kin to each other] and that we are each essential to the other.

I hug, love and kiss you

Your Vol

The word rodnye is a loaded and deeply tender one. Rod means "family, birth, origin"; and when used by lovers rodnye implies that the loved one is "one of my own family." These are words that no man would use toward a woman for whom he has an exclusively physical attraction, and they give an added depth of tenderness to Mayakovsky's letters. He uses rodnaia again as he once more reproaches Tatiana for not writing to him, and tries to speed her return with yet another salvo of praise for Soviet society:

Excuse me for writing so often. You see, I don't pay attention to your silence. Why do you, rodnaia, take so many counts on our exchange of letters? . . . We are now better off than people have been at any time, in any place. Such a huge communal work has never been known in human history, Tanik! You're a super-capable girl. Become an engineer. You can do it, don't spend yourself entirely on hats. . . . I want this so much, Tanka the engineer somewhere in Altai [a mountain chain in Central Asia]. Let's do it, right?

The notion of my frivolous, luxury-loving mother returning to an increasingly frugal Russia to build Socialism as an engineer in Central Asia always strikes me as comical. On the other hand, the last of Mayakovsky's letters to have survived, written on October 5, 1929, often brings tears to my eyes:

My own beloved. I don't have and could never have any other endearments for you. Keep this word in mind for at least 55 years.

Could it be true that you don't write only because "I'm not very generous with words"? This is absurd-it is impossible to describe and document all the sorrows that make me even more silent. Or even more likely, could it be that French poets, or people of more common professions, are now more pleasing to you? . . .But if that's the case then no one at any time will ever convince me that you have grown apart from me.

My telegram to you was returned with a message that they could not find you at that address. Write, write, write, dear child. I still don't believe that you've grown indifferent to me! Write today! Books are piled up and other news which are making little screams and begging to go into your paws.

I kiss you, love you

Your Vol

Mayakovsky's references to "all the sorrows that make me even more silent" have everything to do with the events of 1929, which Russians refer to as god velikogo pereloma-"the year of the great transformation." It was in 1929 that the relatively relaxed and pluralistic first decade of Soviet culture came to a definitive end. To follow the denouement of Mayakovsky's romance with my mother, one needs to grasp that year's pivotal importance.

The last months of 1928 had marked the ascendance of Joseph Stalin to unchallenged power in the Communist Party hierarchy and the beginning of his violent transformation of Soviet society. This entailed, among other measures, the forced collectivization of Soviet peasantry, a series of "five-year plans" to return the management of all enterprises to the central government, a resumption of cultural isolation from the West, and-most relevant to Mayakovsky-the imposition of strict Party controls over education and culture. In January of 1929, Stalin banished Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Union, and soon began to single outcultural organizations and particular writers for opprobrium. And by that autumn Stalin's regime was making it increasingly difficult for Soviet citizens to travel abroad.

This "Revolution from Above," as it is called, also enabled the Soviet Union's most oppressive literary faction, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (or RAPP), to gain ascendance over literature. In December of 1929, an editorial in the Communist Party paper Pravda demanded that all Soviet writers support RAPP and adopt its edicts, which required a strict adherence to proletarian values, and the elimination of all "bourgeois" and "deviationist" writing. This is the context within which Mayakovsky, in the early fall of 1929, was either denied a visa to return to Paris to resume his courtship of my mother or else warned that he should not even risk the political dangers of asking for one.

The autumn of 1929 is also that moment at which any precise rendering of Mayakovsky's romance with my mother becomes extremely difficult, and falls prey to conjecture and to aging survivors' capricious memories of the past. But, whatever versions are accepted, it is clear that the same historical forces that were about to cleave asunder, for many decades, the two Russias-the increasingly rigid Soviet state, and the beloved lost homeland of emigre communities throughout the world-were central to the finality of the lovers' separation.

My mother's version of the denouement goes as follows: Shortly after she received that last, October letter from Mayakovsky, she heard from Elsa Triolet that he had been denied a visa. (Although Tatiana's ferocious pride kept her from ever admitting it, it is probable that Triolet, at her sister's suggestion, had also advised Tatiana of his romance with Polonskaya.) Smarting from that revelation, warned by friends of the growing repression in Russia, and recalling the poet's repeated hints, in whatever letters had got through to her, about all the great "difficulties" he had been having, she decided, sorrowfully, that their future together was doomed. And she set about making other plans for her life. One of the two persons in the "vicious magical circle" of suitors she had mentioned earlier that year to her mother was a dashing French diplomat four years her elder, Vicomte Bertrand du Plessix, a specialist in Slavic languages who for the previous year had been posted as an attache at the French Embassy in Warsaw. In mid-October of 1929, when he returned to Paris for one of his rare home leaves, she accepted his offer of marriage.

Unfortunately, between mid-October and late December, the period during which my mother must have first mentioned du Plessix in her letters to Russia and announced her engagement and pending marriage, there is a gap in her correspondence with her mother: no letters have survived. Documents at the Mayakovsky Museum reveal that the secret police made several visits to my grandmother's flat in Penza in the nineteen-thirties and absconded with letters she had received from abroad. Whether by coincidence or by design, the visitors seized all letters written by my mother in the last two and a half months of 1929. Her last October communication, posted on the fifteenth of that month, tersely states that "Mayakovsky is not coming this winter." There are no more letters until late December, after her marriage to du Plessix. So, for the autumnal phase of the romance, it is instructive to hear out Lili Brik, who in 1968 recalled in a letter the October evening upon which Mayakovsky first heard of my mother's engagement:

We were quietly sitting in the dining room on Gendrikov Street. Volodia was waiting for his car, he was about to go to Leningrad for several appearances. . . . A letter came from Elsa. As always, I started to read the letter aloud. Along with the various other events that Elsa was sharing with us was the news that Yakovleva, with whom Volodia, out of sheer inertia, was still in love, was engaged to marry some French viscount or other, that she was going to marry him in a church, in a white dress and orange blossoms, that she was very concerned that Volodia not learn about this because he might cause a scandal.

Brik then pretends that she would not have read that passage to Mayakovsky if her sister had warned her properly. She continued:

Lili's account of the poet's state of mind also included the recollections of his chauffeur, who related that upon meeting him that night Mayakovsky had uttered a curse, then remained silent during the ride to the station. "Do excuse me, do not be angry at me, Comrade Gamazin," he said as they arrived. "Please, my heart is aching." The following day, Lili Brik decided to follow Mayakovsky to Leningrad to boost his morale. As they rode together from one crowded reading to another, Brik reports, Mayakovsky kept making derisive comments about French nobility-whatever his growing difficulties with the Soviet regime, he was vexed that he had been upstaged in the affections of the woman he loved by an aristocrat. " 'We're not French viscounts, we work hard,' he would say. Or, 'If I were a baron . . .' " The news of Tatiana's impending marriage seems to have greatly embittered him.

As for Tatiana's recollections of October, 1929, they are excerpted from a series of conversations with the closest friend she had in her last decade of life, the Russian scholar and ballet historian Gennady Smakov. Smakov was planning to write a biography of her, and she spoke more candidly with him about the past than she had to anyone thus far:

I loved [Mayakovsky], he himself knew it, but . . . my love was not strong enough to go away with him. And if he'd returned a third time I'm not absolutely sure that I wouldn't have left . . . I missed him terribly. I might well have left. . . . Fifty-fifty. . . . [I got married] in order to untie the knot. In the fall of '29, du Plessix came to Paris and started courting me. Since Mayakovsky could not come I was totally free. I thought that he did not want to take on that responsibility, to be stuck with a young woman . . . I thought to myself, perhaps he just got scared? . . . [du Plessix] came openly to [my grandmother's] house-we had nothing to hide, he was a Frenchman, a bachelor, it wasn't Mayakovsky. I married him, and he was amazing towards me.

"Did you love du Plessix?" Smakov asks. A long pause follows.

"No, I didn't love him," she replies. "It was a flight from Mayakovsky. Clearly, the frontier was closed to him, whereas I wanted to build a normal life, I wanted children, do you understand? Francine was born nine months and two days after the wedding."

My parents were married on December 23, 1929. My mother's letters to my grandmother resume again six days later, during her honeymoon, which was spent in Italy. In the first letter, posted in Naples, she describes her wedding.Her uncle, Alexandre Iacovleff, had given her away, and her wedding dress had been "kolossal'nyi uspekh," "a colossal success." She and Bertrand were about to set forth for Pompeii. Bertrand was "very caring, a tender husband and a marvelous companion."

Within three years, they were estranged, and my father would die with the Free French in the Second World War. Perhaps he sensed that she had not loved him. Perhaps he was the first to realize that Mayakovsky had been the only great love of Tatiana's life.

Mayakovsky's last months brought a succession of heartbreaks. His play "The Bathhouse," a violent attack on the increasingly rigid Soviet bureaucracy that, in his view, was betraying the 1917 Revolution, was received with what one eyewitness described as "murderous coldness." But the public's animosity was becoming far more personal. Even though he seldom used the car he had sent back for Lili the previous year, and had to get her permission each time he wished to borrow it, he was being censured for owning such a luxurious possession. He was even criticized for the pen of foreign make he always carried on him-the Waterman that had been my mother's parting gift. His exhibition "Twenty Years of Work," which opened on February 1, 1930-posters, paintings, graphics, diverse editions of his books-was boycotted by all official writers' groups, and was visited almost exclusively by students. He paced the empty rooms, with a "sad and austere face, arms folded behind him." ("Just think, Norochka, not one writer came!" he complained to Polonskaya.) One day in January, he read his ode to Lenin at the Bolshoi Theatre in the presence of Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, but this honor did not cheer him. The winter of 1929-30 appeared to be a year of artistic failures. He felt increasingly isolated, and Polonskaya wrote that, with the exception of his poem "At the Top of My Voice," he was experiencing a true writer's block. That poem, in which he describes himself as "a latrine cleaner / and water carrier, / by the revolution / mobilized and drafted" and laments that he had been "setting [his] heel / on the throat / of [his] own song," is as telling a comment as any on his disillusionment.

In the winter months shortly after my mother's marriage, Mayakovsky, according to Nora Polonskaya, began pressing her to leave her husband and marry him. But after the New Year their affair went through a difficult phase: she had been pregnant with his child and had an abortion; afterward, she was sexually indifferent to him. Friends noted that a mood of "helplessness, loneliness, heartache . . . had come over him," and that for the first time in his life he was drinking heavily.

In February, 1930, in the midst of this emotional disarray, Mayakovsky further alienated his old friends by joining RAPP, the Party-led literary organization, which had begun to attack the more independent Soviet intellectuals for their "anarchism" and "Trotskyist deviation." RAPP, which Osip Brik had urged him to join as a way of allaying his isolation, was looked on with horror by the writers he most honored. But even that sinister group reacted disdainfully to Mayakovsky's move: its officials placed him in a small section of minor and beginning writers, and assigned him to the humiliating process of "reeducation." Audiences heckled him increasingly at his readings, and even students-traditionally his most devoted fans-had begun to tell him that his poems were unintelligible. Moreover, the Briks' home had ceased to offer him relief from solitude: Osip and Lili had gone to England at the end of February; it was the first time since they had all lived together that both of them were away. He had no one but Nora to turn to. He insisted she remain with him at every moment of the day. Bitter arguments arose because she wanted to look after her own career.

On April 11, 1930, for the first time in his life, Mayakovsky failed to appear at a reading he had been scheduled to give. On April 13th, he telephoned several friends to see who was free, and was pained to hear that they were all busy. "It means that nothing can be done," he muttered to the sister-in-law of one colleague. He ended up by going to the home of his friend Valentin Kataev, who describes the following scene: Volodia and Nora spent the evening writing each other notes on little bits of cardboard torn out of a chocolate box, which Mayakovsky, who drank more than usual that night, tossed across the table to Nora with the gesture of a roulette player. At 3 A.M., they went to their respective homes. In the morning, Mayakovsky came by to pick her up and take her to his apartment. According to Nora's memoirs, they quarrelled a great deal-he pressured her to remain with him, while she insisted that she had to go to rehearsal.

At 10:15 A.M., barely able to free herself from her lover's grip, Nora ran out of his room. A few seconds later, as she was beginning to go down the corridor, she heard a pistol shot. She hastened back into his room. It was still filled with smoke.

Mayakovsky had been rehearsing this act in his poetry since his adolescence. "It might be far better for me / to punctuate my end with a bullet," he had written in 1915. Yet, when the suicide actually occurred, it had the impact of a national disaster. Pasternak's description of the mayhem caused in Moscow by the poet's death is now a classic:

Pasternak's analysis of Mayakovsky's suicide is particularly lucid: "Mayakovsky shot himself out of pride because he had condemned something in himself . . . with which his self-respect could not be reconciled."

The poet's suicide was not as sudden as it initially seemed. He left a note, written in pencil in a large, clear hand on three pieces of white paper, which he'd apparently started composing two days before his death. "To All" ("Vsem"), it began. "Do not blame anyone for my death, and please, no gossip. The deceased always detested gossip. Mother, sisters, friends, forgive me-this is not the way (I do not recommend it to others) but there is no other way out for me."

The suicide note went on to dictate that all his papers be taken care of by the Briks. Documents at the Mayakovsky Museum indicate that a highly placed official of the secret police, whose building was adjacent to the poet's studio, was the first of Mayakovsky's acquaintances, after Nora, to rush into his room. He seized a great many of Mayakovsky's papers and a few days later handed most of them to the Briks, who had received the news in Berlin and immediately come home.

"I'm rummaging in Volodia's little papers," Lili wrote a friend a few weeks after the tragedy, "and sometimes it seems to me I do what I have to do." It is widely assumed by Mayakovsky scholars that Lili burned my mother's letters within a few weeks of the poet's death. "It was outrageous for Lili to burn my letters," my mother said in 1981 in one of her talks with Smakov. "I forgave her because she confessed to it in a short note which was delivered to me by a Soviet professor. . . . But I don't understand why she did it. Was it jealousy? Why should she destroy all the traces and tokens of his love for me? If that was her intent, she should have destroyed the poem 'Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva'. . . well, that was not in her power."

There was one possible token of Mayakovsky's love for my mother which Lili did not choose to destroy, however-a poem found, untitled, among recent entries in his notebook, which is now considered one of his greatest love lyrics. This, in fact, was the poem from which he borrowed several lines for his suicide note (I have italicized them below):

Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.

The Milky Way streams silver through the night.

I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams

I have no cause to wake or trouble you.

And, as they say, the incident is closed.

Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.

Now you and I are quits. Why bother then

to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.

Behold what quiet settles on the world.

Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.

In hours like these, one rises to address

Only one word of the poem was changed: the phrase "Now you and I are quits" was altered to "Now life and I are quits."

My mother heard about Mayakovsky's death when she was four months pregnant with me. She was in Warsaw, where she had settled with my father after their honeymoon. Her relatives in Paris had cabled my father, asking him to keep her from reading any Russian newspapers. But in most European cities the news made the front page.

"I was utterly destroyed by today's newspapers," she wrote in her first bereaved note to her mother. "It was a terrible shock. . . . You'll understand."

My grandmother seems to have expressed concern that her daughter was taking too much of the blame for the poet's death, for two weeks later Tatiana wrote:

Mamulechka moia rodnaia,

Your Tania.

For a few years after his suicide-which was criticized by many as a most un-Socialist act-publication of Mayakovsky's work was reduced to a trickle. In the face of the growing Stalinist repression, the Soviet literary establishment was hedging its bets about what stand to take on him. And, however one may feel about Lili Brik, one cannot deny that she and her husband were exclusively responsible for reviving a public cult of the poet. In 1935, with the help of Lili's then lover, a high-ranking Army general, they got a letter through to Joseph Stalin which asked him to rehabilitate Mayakovsky, reminding him that the poet's verses were "the strongest revolutionary weapon." Stalin replied quickly, writing directly upon the upper-left-hand corner of Brik's letter-in red pencil, in a bold, large, slanting hand-"Comrade Brik is right: Mayakovsky was and remains the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his memory and words is a crime." The following day, Stalin's comments appeared as headlines in the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, Pravda, and from then on Soviet citizens were ceaselessly reminded of Mayakovsky's civic virtues, and were taught that he was the one and only "poet of the Revolution." For years, public squares, schools, subway stations, tractors, minesweepers, and steamships were named for him. In Pasternak's scornful phrase, Mayakovsky was "propagated compulsorily, like potatoes in the reign of Catherine the Great."

Two years after Stalin's apotheosis of Mayakovsky, in 1937, in the middle of the great purges to which the poet, had he been alive, would surely have been one of the first to succumb, the Soviet government installed a Mayakovsky museum in the flat that he had shared with the Briks. But in the Soviet Union literature seldom remained untainted by politics. The poet's older sister Ludmila had long been determined to minimize in her brother's life the role of "the nightmarish and monstrous" Lili Brik, and to promote, instead, my mother. She began her campaign during the cultural ferment of the first post-Stalin decade, when the Soviet regime's iconic poet, with ironic justice, had grown to be a symbol of creative freedom, and Mayakovsky Square had become a meeting place for human-rights activists and for readings of "unofficial" writers.

As part of her anti-Brik campaign, Ludmila persuaded the government to move the Mayakovsky Museum out of the Briks' former flat and install a far grander one in the building on Lubiansky Passage where he had had his studio, and where he had ended his life. A warm letter from Ludmila to my mother in 1967 informs her that some time earlier she had asked a friend to visit my maternal grandmother. On this visit, Ludmila writes, her friend had received a large collection of my mother's letters and other family documents, which he had passed on to her. This collection, indeed, now comprises the Mayakovsky Museum's Tatiana Yakovleva Archive.

Because of her inscrutability and her immense powers of seduction, my mother was the kind of woman who inspired a multitude of legends (and even deceits, as in my stepfather's case). And the myths that accreted about her have posed surprising annoyances for me whenever I've returned to Russia. There was a widespread rumor in the nineteen-seventies, for instance, that I was Mayakovsky's daughter, a myth in part traceable to a memoir of Mayakovsky written by the poet's oldest friend, David Burliuk, when he was approaching eighty and may have been in his dotage. "In December [of 1929] or January, 1930," Burliuk alleges, "Tatiana . . . gave birth to a girl who was Mayakovsky's daughter.' " (I was born in September, 1930, more than sixteen months after my mother's last parting with the poet.) The allegation came to haunt me in 1979, when I travelled to the Soviet Union to take part in a Soviet-American literary conference. On a night train bound for Tbilisi, Georgia, two of my Soviet colleagues came into my compartment and for some hours tried to convince me that I was the poet's daughter. As dawn broke, I confronted them with the date on my passport. "This would have been an elephant's gestation!" I exclaimed. "Someone faked your passport," my Soviet colleagues parried back.

Fifty years after Mayakovsky's death, upon one of the occasions when Gennady Smakov prodded my mother to speak about Mayakovsky and the impact of his suicide on her life, she had this to say:

I've not been able to reread his letters since his death. Even now I can not. . . . What I felt was far worse than grief. It was the most dreadful mourning.

Only in the past months, after reading this exchange in the context of my recently discovered family documents, did I understand why my possessive stepfather, who had worked hard to create the legend that he was the center of Tatiana's universe, preferred to withhold the poet's letters from me. Only now have I begun to see why my mother, who loved me deeply, also preferred that I not probe too far into her romance with the kind, doomed poet: Mayakovsky's death had been the central fissure, the principal tragedy of her life. And she did not want me to share her "most dreadful mourning" for him, at least not while she was still alive: perhaps she wished to keep this mourning for herself; perhaps she wished to protect me from it.

And perhaps she was right to try to do so. Probing my mother's personal history-sensing the pain of her enforced separation from Mayakovsky, learning that she never truly loved my own heroic father, knowing how close she came to returning to Russia and becoming one of the millions lost in Stalin's purges-has created a state of inner havoc that I'm only beginning to come to terms with. And yet, in the process of researching this episode of my mother's past, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky has truly become my rodnoi-a beloved lost kinsman, whom I now think of and grieve for often, but who finally fulfilled his wish to speak to "the ages, history, and all creation." Through him, I may well have come into the most treasured part of my inheritance-my mother's grief.

My mother was not one to continue bearing grudges against any of Mayakovsky's friends. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, upon hearing that Lilia Yurevna Brik had been ill, my mother wished to send her a sign of conciliation. (Brik, who was crippled with pain after suffering a hip fracture, committed suicide in 1978, at the age of eighty-six.) One evening in Paris, my mother was dining in her hotel room with a mutual friend of hers and Brik's, Pierre Berge, who was about to go to Moscow and had asked her whether she wished to send anything to her fellow-muse. She went into her bedroom and brought back a small white handkerchief, neatly folded. "Just give this to Lili, and she'll understand," she said, handing him the kerchief.

Berge flew to Moscow the following day, went to visit Lili Brik his first evening there, and handed her the white handkerchief. "Tatiana says you'll understand," he said.

Lili gravely nodded her head. "I understand," she said.

The white flag, in most cultures, is a symbol of peace. For Lili and my mother, the white kerchief also became a sign of shared mourning. (c)

LOAD-DATE: January 8, 2002