Yevgeny Onegin, the title character of Pushkin’s 1833 masterpiece, is the prototype of the ‘superfluous man’, a literary figure that would haunt Russian literature. These are sensitive individuals who agonise over the problems of life – the emotional dilemmas of the individual, the evils of society – but are superfluous because they are gripped by Hamlet-like catatonia. Their frustration finds expression in gratuitous cruelty towards those they love and actions they know will bring ruin on themselves.
Pushkin’s Onegin, a bored Petersburg dandy, attracts the love of Tatiana Larina. Young, impressionable and romantic, she bares her soul to him in a passionate letter, but Onegin turns her down. A fateful duel forces him to flee from Russia. He travels abroad to deaden his anguish.
When he returns, Onegin sees Tatiana at a ball. She is beautiful. He is overwhelmed by love for her. He writes burning, passionate letters, but she does not reply. While he was away, Tatiana has married an aged general. Onegin curses himself for having spurned her love. He is obsessed with winning her back. Tatiana recalls the days when they might have been happy. She admits she still loves him; but she must respect the duty that binds her to her husband. Onegin’s actions have brought sorrow on her and despair upon himself.
When Zinaida Raikh married Vsevolod Meyerhold in the spring of 1922, those versed in the new conventions of Soviet-speak followed the press coverage with interest. Meyerhold, previously described as ‘the great director’, was now elevated to ‘the great socialist director’. Zinaida, formerly ‘the actress Raikh’, became ‘the socialist actress’ (but did not gain the final accolade). Nuanced adjectives in the Soviet era would become an official codification of the recipients’ standing in the Bolshevik cosmology.
The theatre world turned out for the wedding. Leading actors lent their voices to the speeches. Meyerhold’s political connections ensured a Bolshevik presence. Lunacharsky was there. Trotsky accepted, but was unable to attend. Meyerhold had wanted to invite Stalin, but Zinaida objected.
‘Stalin is a peasant,’ she said, ‘with dirty boots. We can’t have him soiling the carpets. Trotsky would never forgive us if we invited the little upstart.’
Meyerhold fretted. Had they repeated the error of Sleeping Beauty’s father?
Picking up the paper with news of the wedding, Sergei’s throat tightened. For an agonised moment he could not breathe. He sat down to write to Zinaida. He had the poem’s title – ‘Letter to a Woman’ – and the opening lines.
You remember
– for you remember everything –
How I stood there leaning on the doorframe
As you strode, angry, back and forth,
Hurling barbs in my direction.
My love!
I tortured you.
I saw the suffering in your eyes,
As I destroyed myself in wild deeds before you.
What you did not know
Was that I was adrift, lost in the storm . . .
He could get no further. He wanted to voice the anguish and bewilderment, the self-inflicted loss; but the words would not come. Onegin had felt it a hundred years before him. He settled for Pushkin’s version of what he was feeling.
I loved you; even now I must confess,
The embers of my love still smoulder here.
But do not let it cause you more distress,
I have no wish to sadden you, my dear.
Silently, hopelessly I loved you,
At times too jealous, at times too shy.
God grant you find another who will love you
As tenderly and truthfully as I.
He sent it to Zinaida, with a note that struggled to be serene.
‘The greatest test of love,’ he wrote, ‘is the ability to wish the other person well, even if you lose her. Tatiana and Onegin’s story is the choice between cynicism and love. Sooner or later, everyone must make it.’
Like Isadora, Meyerhold was older. Twenty years Zinaida’s senior, he appeared staid. Beside Sergei, he was dull.
But he cared for her and he cared for her children. He obtained a formal adoption order for Tanya and Kostya and looked after them as his own. He gave them the paternal presence that Sergei had never offered. He gave Zinaida the steady, reliable affection she had never had.
Tatiana and Konstantin, Yesenin’s children with Zinaida
‘Letter to a Woman’, the poem to Zinaida that he had failed to complete, was stuffed in the drawer. He would return to it endlessly, extending, amending and polishing.
Just as ‘The Dark Man’ would become the lyric diary of the poet’s struggle with his demons, so ‘Letter to a Woman’ would be the evolving record of his feelings for Zinaida; feelings that would alter, but never fade.
He married Isadora Duncan on 2 May 1922 at the Registry Office of Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Soviet. The wedding certificate tactfully deducted eight years from her age.
The two weddings took place within days of each other, in the same city, with the parted lovers each marrying partners two decades older than themselves.
Sergei and Zinaida pledged their future to people they didn’t really love, for reasons involving desperation, rage and revenge. The consequences would be as intense as any Greek drama.
Isadora’s relationship with the revolution never wavered. To love an ideal was easier than to love a person; and loving a foreign ideal far less complicated than having one foisted upon you.
Sergei, like most Russians, did waver. A generation of artists and writers had greeted the perception of freedom bestowed by the Bolsheviks with exhilaration. In the years that followed, the youthful passion that overwhelms caution had given way to suspicions, the dawn of mistrust. When doubts surfaced about the purity of the regime’s motives, they suppressed them. When the regime’s faults became manifest, they looked away. The revolution would turn against them. Some it would consume in the killing machine of the Gulag; others would renounce their art. More than one would succumb to despair. Some would conclude their life was no longer worth living.
He found Isadora’s unqualified enthusiasm irritating. In 1917, in New York, she had declared her unconditional devotion to the ideals of the Red October.
‘In my red tunic,’ she wrote – in words swiftly communicated to the Kremlin – ‘I have constantly danced the Revolution and the call to arms of the oppressed. On the night of the Russian Revolution I danced with a terrible fierce joy. My heart was bursting within me at the release of all those who had suffered, been tortured or died in the cause of humanity.’
Four years later, in the spring of 1921, the Bolsheviks invited her to Moscow. Her dance school had been struggling in the West; they guaranteed her success. ‘The Russian government alone can understand you,’ they wrote – or, at least, that is what she told Sergei they wrote. ‘Come to us! We will make your school. We will give you a building and a thousand children. You may carry out your idea on a grand scale.’
She showed him the reply she had sent to Lunacharsky:
I do not wish money in exchange for my work. I want a studio-workshop, a house for myself and my pupils and the opportunity to give our best work. I am sick of bourgeois commercialism. I want to dance for the masses, for the working people who need my art. I will come and work for the future of the Russian Republic and its children!
Sergei told Lola to explain that not everything was as simple or as sunny as Isadora thought. Isadora was not dissuaded:
‘On the way here to Russia, I was a soul ascending to a higher sphere. I was travelling to the ideal state. When the boat arrived, my heart gave a great throb of joy. I was entering the domain of communism, the beautiful new world of comrades. A great force had given capitalism, with its monstrous greed and villainy, one great blow. It was the dream that resounded through all the words of Christ, the ultimate hope of all great artists. It was a dream that Lenin has turned into reality. I have been called upon to assist it in its first steps. I am part of this great dream, and my work and my life will be a part of its glorious future!’
The Bolsheviks rewarded her with a studio at 20 Prechistenka Street in central Moscow. It had been the property of the tsar’s favourite ballerina, Alexandra Balashova, and – before that – the mansion of Pyotr Smirnov, the vodka distiller. There was a ballroom and a dance studio, with marble columns and high mahogany doors, and accommodation for Isadora and her staff. Lunacharsky ensured that the Duncan State School of Dance received, if not a thousand, then a good hundred or so willing students.
At the age of forty-five, Isadora was a skilful teacher. Her pupils found her warm and encouraging. But she was no longer the lithe dancer of her youth. When the Kremlin, eager to exploit her propaganda value, invited her to perform at the Bolshoi, she should probably have declined. She didn’t.
In her trademark bare feet and Greek tunic she danced her most revolutionary programme. In those passages where Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave quotes the tsarist national anthem she gave her interpretation of the suffering masses, followed by the downtrodden people rising up to throw off their chains. The ‘Internationale’, played fast and loud, was a stirring, whirling finale of revolutionary fervour, designed to unleash a storm of applause.
The audience did applaud, but half-heartedly. They seemed bemused. There was a moment of hesitation and the theatre emptied almost at once.
In the morning, with Lola’s help, Isadora scanned the press. The political commentators spoke of her Bolshevik commitment. Izvestiya praised her ‘inimitable mime’.
Against the background of Tchaikovsky, Duncan depicted in moving gestures a bent, oppressed, fettered slave who falls exhausted to his knees. But at the first notes of the accursed tsarist hymn, he lifts his tormented head in an awful grimace of hatred. Then with all his force he straightens himself and breaks his chains. His arms rise in triumph and he walks onwards to a new and joyful life. Everyone understood the allegory. This was Duncan’s revolutionary interpretation of the oppressed Russian people who break the chains of tsarism and triumph in the revolution.
But the arts correspondents – those who knew about dance – were scathing. The critic, Denis Leshkov, compared the Isadora of 1922 with the young dancer he had first seen fifteen years earlier.
Pitiless time has wrought great changes in Duncan. Not a trace of her former lightness now remains. Her interpretation of Tchaikovsky is so subjective, so like random improvisation, that one begins to feel sorry for the composer. His music has been reduced to an incidental accompaniment for inexpressive poses and slightly absurd arm waving. Can, for instance, any purpose be discerned in her protracted and monotonous sweeping of the floor with her hair? The audience’s response was unambiguous – faint applause, mingled with boos and catcalls. The overall impression was one of monotonous boredom and exceptional feebleness.
The ballet dancer, Igor Schwezoff, was merciless.
I saw a woman who looked over fifty, wearing a transparent giton over a naked, flabby body, massive and shapeless, hopping and tripping with rudimentary movements whose range was limited in the extreme. Now and then some of the audience tittered. Her dances called forth half-hearted applause. She walked about the stage for an interminable time, paying no attention to the music. Isadora Duncan’s body was quite expressionless and gave me a feeling of embarrassment at its helpless clumsiness. When her giton slipped and left her bosom more than generously exposed, she was in such an ecstasy that she made no attempt to correct it. Those who wanted to giggle at this tragi-comic spectacle had to keep a straight face, for the music was the national anthem. This was the great Duncan! An artist of such prestige, reduced to using such cheap devices, wringing applause from her audience by a kind of flattery that I found particularly nauseating. I saw a mediocre danseuse taking refuge behind a lot of sham philosophy and spurious classicism.
Isadora put the reviews in the trash and opened a bottle. By evening, she was incoherent. She insisted on going out to a restaurant, where she was so disorderly that the police were called to arrest her.
On the evening that Isadora was being escorted to a police cell, Zinaida had her first breakdown.
She had not slept for four days; she was unable to stop the crying that convulsed her body. When Meyerhold tried to calm her, she screamed and threw herself to the floor. He called a doctor.
The medic gave her an injection. ‘In times like ours,’ he said, ‘many are suffering. I have seen even the strongest laid low. The trials of our heartless century have ground us down. Madame Raikh is far from the worst case. Will you allow me to take her into our care for a few days? I can observe her and decide what is best for the future.’
In his colourful, sometimes truthful, sometimes mendacious memoirs, Marienhof describes a scene in which Vsevolod Meyerhold, still married to his wife Olga, supposedly speaks to Yesenin, still married to Zinaida.
‘You know, Seryozha,’ said Meyerhold. ‘I am really in love with your wife. Would you mind terribly if we were to get married?’
‘Not at all,’ said Yesenin, with an effusive bow. ‘Be my guest. Take her. You’ll be doing me a favour. I’ll be grateful to you until my dying day.’
Then Yesenin lifted up his lip to show Meyerhold a sore on his gum and smiled. ‘Do you think I’ve got syphilis?’
The account is typical Marienhof – waspish, amusing and spiteful. Yesenin’s mischievous hint that he has syphilis (he didn’t) suggests a warning to the man who is taking his wife. His purported eagerness to give her away suggests he has tired of her or knows already that she is mentally disturbed. Neither was true. Her troubles would begin only after – perhaps because of – her split from the man she loved.
That Zinaida was admitted to the psychiatric clinic as Isadora was sitting in the police cell was a coincidence. Neither woman – neither couple – knew what was happening to the other.
Sergei did not know what was happening to Zinaida because she had ceased to write to him. He had heard nothing from her since the weddings that disunited them as man and wife. When she fell ill, she instructed Meyerhold not to tell anyone, least of all Sergei.
Isadora’s arrest was hushed up by a Bolshevik leadership that did not want its supporters discredited. The police officer who had her in custody was instructed to apologise then release her in the morning.
Those who knew both Sergei and Zinaida did not inform either of them of the other’s life. Had they done so, Sergei might have run to Zinaida that morning, rather than going to collect his wife from the police.