In the Siberia of the Heart

By Patricia Blake

I LOVE: THE STORY OF VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY AND LILI BRIK by Ann and Samuel Charters; Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; 398 pages; $17.50

Few modern poets have got so worked up over their women as Louis Aragon and Vladimir Mayakovsky. For nearly 40 years the poet laureate of the French Communist Party rhapsodized in verse over Les Yeux d'Elsa and other cherished features of his wife Elsa Triolet. Mayakovsky, the bard of the Bolshevik Revolution, was no less attentive to his mistress Lili Brik, though his poems were scarcely as complimentary as Aragon's. Lili was Elsa's older sister, and the series of stunning lyrics that Mayakovsky dedicated to her in the 1910s and 1920s agonized over her indifference and infidelity. The Russian poet, who conducted his life as hyperbolically as he composed his verse, complained in "The Backbone Flute" that Lili's lips were "a monastery hacked out of frigid stone" and her eyes "the gaping hollows of two graves." Condemned by her coldness to the Siberia of the heart, he wrote:

. . I'll scratch Lili's name on my fetters,

and in the darkness of hard labor, kiss them again and again.

Elsa and Lili were born in the 1890s, the daughters of a well-to-do Jewish lawyer in Moscow. Before the Revolution, Mayakovsky had courted Elsa, flouting her family's objections to the scruffy, hulking poet who had served a prison term at 16 for Bolshevik subversion. But when Elsa, who was quite plain, introduced him to her handsome married sister in 1915, Mayakovsky formed a passionate attachment to Lili that only his suicide in 1930 could terminate. After his death, these redoubtable sisters were to play key roles in the production of the Mayakovsky legend. Settling in France with Aragon, Elsa became the Russian poet's translator and the chief purveyor of his work in Europe. Aragon's high Party connections added luster to his sister-in-law Lili's position in Russia, where she had become the guardian of Mayakovsky's literary legacy.

Mayakovsky's reputation as the "iron poet" of the Revolution had slumped temporarily when he put a bullet through his all too vulnerable heart at the age of 36. Obsessed with suicide all his life, he finally, for no clearly discernible reason, "did away with himself as he would an enemy," as another poet, Marina Tsvetayeva, remarked. Official reservations about Mayakovsky's posthumous status were dissipated by Stalin in 1935, when he declared him to be the most talented poet of the Soviet era. "Indifference to his memory and to his work is a crime," he added menacingly.

As a result of that dictum, Lili was soon presiding over a veritable industry devoted to Mayakovskyana. A museum was established in the apartment where Mayakovsky had lived in a menage a trois with Lili and her husband Osip Brik, who had been the poet's first publisher. Lili officiated at the unveiling of innumerable statues in Mayakovsky's image. She attended ceremonies in connection with the renaming of streets, squares and subway stations in Mayakovsky's honor. She published his love letters and telegrams (signed "Puppy") and edited a twelve-volume collected works. To date, some 75 million copies of the poet's books have been published in the U.S.S.R. as part of this vast propagation effort. Mayakovsky "began to be introduced forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great," said Boris Pasternak. "This was his second death; he had no hand in it."

Then, in 1968, when Lili was 77 years old, her position as the reigning muse of Soviet poetry was threatened by a bizarre combination of people and circumstances. Two strikingly anti-Semitic magazine articles appeared claiming that Mayakovsky's true love had been Tatiana Yakovleva, a genuine ethnic Russian, not a Jew like Lili. The Briks, the article suggested, had conspired to wreck the romance, thus driving the poet to suicide.

Most of the story was as preposterous as it was invidious. It had been inspired by Mayakovsky's sister, Liudmila, who loathed Lili. Liudmila's hostility had been exploited by cultural bureaucrats desirous of seizing the vast and profitable Mayakovsky publishing concession for themselves. In a period of heightened Soviet anti-Semitism following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, nothing could save Lili. Even Aragon, whose influence had waned, was helpless. By 1972 the Mayakovsky Museum and Library had been moved from the Briks' old flat, while all traces of Lili's 15-year connection with the poet were eliminated from the new premises.

It was at this juncture that Lili turned to two American tourists in Moscow who happened by with a letter of introduction. Desperate to restore her name to the rec ord, she offered Ann and Samuel Charters a series of interviews with herself and other old friends of Mayakovsky's, and produced some unpublished materials documenting her association with him.

The book resulting from these efforts would undoubtedly have displeased Lili, who committed suicide last year at the age of 86. In spite of the evident bias of their informants, the authors were able to maintain their objectivity about a love affair between two exceptionally over wrought Russians. The Charterses' lively, gossipy account offers hardly any in sight into Mayakovsky's poetry, but it does provide some nuggets of new information that supplement or corroborate aspects of Edward J. Brown's splendid critical biography of Mayakovsky, published in 1973.

What the Charters book demonstrates best is the difficulty of presenting Vladimir and Lili as an engaging couple. Still, Mayakovsky's appalling self-absorption is at least partly redeemed by his genius, his misery and his irrepressible sense of humor. Lili, however, emerges as a frivolous, tough and faintly sinister character.

One of the book's few revelations concerns the extent of her involvement with the Soviet secret police. Her husband had been an early employee of the Cheka, and she pursued the association by welcoming agents to gatherings at the apartment the Briks shared with Mayakovsky. One of the lovers Lili took when Mayakovsky was still alive was a high-level secret police official. But the most shocking anecdote is provided by Rita Rait, now one of Russia's most distinguished translators from English. In the '20s, Lili sought to recruit Rait to spy on Russian emigres in Berlin, and arranged a meeting for the purpose with a police agent in her own apartment.

There was nothing extraordinary about Lili's camaraderie with the secret police. After all, Soviet society, including the literary salons, was riddled with spies, as Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled in her magnificent memoir Hope Against Hope. Had Mayakovsky not tak en his own life, he would surely have fallen victim to such informers, as Mandelstam and hundreds of other writers did during the Great Purges of the late '30s. But who could be held accountable for his actions? asked Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her answer may apply to all the characters in the pitiful drama that is played out in this book. A person's be havior, and even character, she wrote, "is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him." --Patricia Blake

Excerpt

"The setting for their meeting was in itself almost symbolic of the point the Briks had come to in their lives. Their Petrograd apartment was a mixture of fashionable bohemianism and middle-class elegance ... The atmosphere was strained when Elsa and Mayakovsky came in. Unwilling to sit down to make polite small talk, he hulked in the doorway to the dining room as the others settled at the table for tea. Lili leaned over to Elsa and whispered, 'Please, I beg you, tell Mayakovsky not to bore us today. Tell him not to read us any poetry.'

Mayakovsky was so used to reluctant audiences ... For the Briks, crowded at the table in their small dining room trying to keep their eyes on their teacups while a towering, disheveled poet recited loudly into their faces, the effect would have been overpowering whether they liked it or not... For Brik the poem was a brilliant revolutionary statement. Osip took the notebook that 'The Cloud in Trousers' had been copied into and read the poem over to himself, while Mayakovsky smiled, stirred jam into his tea, and looked at Lili and Elsa with his large brown eyes. Suddenly he took the notebook from Osip's hands, and asked Lili, 'May I dedicate it to you?' "

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