THE MEMORIES BEGIN. CHILDHOOD IN PETERSBURG. HOW TO EAT BLINTZES. DIGRESSION ON THE DRAWBACKS OF HAVING A SECRETARY. SHKLOVSKY MEETING MAYAKOVSKY, HE DOESN’T REMEMBER EXACTLY WHEN; THE BEGINNING OF THEIR FRIENDSHIP. THE FUTURIST EVENINGS—THE TECHNIQUE OF SCANDAL. BAUDOUIN DE COURTENAY. POETS SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO DIVORCE. SEMINARIANS AND CARPENTERS DUKING IT OUT ON THE ICE.
Today, Viktor Borisovich, I would like you to say something about yourself. Let’s try to follow the timeline of your literary life. What were, and what was the nature of, your first encounters with literature?
The first writer I knew is someone that nobody remembers today. To tell the truth, nobody knew him before either. His name was Shakhparnians. He wrote lyrics for romances and had a good library. He only published in a provincial newspaper, but he was very serious about himself and about poetry—he lived for poetry. Besides that, he wrote handbooks for students: how to write essays that will please teachers. Here’s what happened to this man: one day, after the revolution, I saw a beggar on the street. He approached me and asked me for money. Suddenly, I recognized him. Terribly startled, he said: “Listen, come to my house. I’m not so bad off. I married a woman who works in a pub. She loves my poems, she knows them all by heart. But she won’t let me sell my library, which I’d rather sell so I can buy new books. Now you can get wonderful books for next to nothing.”
It’s curious that you bring up this writer who left nothing behind . . .
When I met him I was twelve years old. This Shakhparnians, an Armenian, was a minor poet, insignificant, but he’s still the first poet I ever met. He knew my parents. Once Maykov wrote my father a letter, a letter about a student at my father’s school. The minor Armenian poet and that letter were perhaps, during my childhood, my only “live” encounters with poetry. What am I trying to say with this? That we, my family and I, lived a thousand kilometers away from poetry, a thousand kilometers away and there were no telegrams, no news. On the other hand . . . Gorky, at the beginning of the revolution, defined the pre-revolutionary period in poetry and art as “shameful.” But he was wrong. Why? In that period Tolstoy was waning, Chekhov was writing, Fet was winding down, Blok was getting started. In music, Shostakovich, Scriabin were starting out. From the window of your own house, even if the window is very high up, it’s hard to recognize your own time. Usually we see our era as a series of close-ups. The most important man is always the one you’re talking to now. And the most important time is the one you’re living in. The person who said that, at the very end of his life, was none other than Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.
You spent the first part of your life in Petersburg. How do you remember this “fateful” city of Russian literature?
The Petersburg of my childhood? Picture a city where the snow is clean, white, exceptionally white. There’s no sound of cars. The streetlamps are fuelled by oil; only downtown are they electric, and they cast a bluish light. A city filled with pedestrians, lots of whom wear long aprons that go past their knees: clerks in the various shops. Carriages pass by. The coaches in the square have very small horses, they’re country horses that the peasants, so as not to let their animals eat for free, send to the city for hire. And the sleighs. Small. They can barely fit two people. But in spring, when the roads are in bad shape from the thaw, the veiki come, the Finnish coachmen. They come with these splendid colts, and the carriages have bells and curtains made of different colored strips of cloth. This is during Carnival. And during this time we eat blintzes. We eat tons of them, everybody makes them, and you have to make them, otherwise you have to explain why not to your neighbors. Delicious blintzes, made with buckwheat. We would eat them, I remember, with snedki. Snedki are tiny fish that were caught in the lake in Gdov, by Petersburg. The lake was overpopulated and the fish were tiny, smaller than a pinky finger. There was an enormous amount of them and they were sold for next to nothing, four kopeks a funt. All this was before the Revolution. At that time, in general, food was inexpensive. For example, in the taverns—there were many, then—for five kopeks you could get borscht with meat and bread, the bread was on the house, and when someone went back once or twice to the same place, they would bow and call him by name and patronym . . . Yes, Petersburg is a splendid city . . . Mendeleev, Blok, Esenin, Pushkin, Lenin, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky . . . It was a unique city, completely different from Moscow. Moscow was wealthier. There was a strong merchant class. But don’t think of just Ostrovsky’s merchants. There was also a class of educated, enlightened merchants, some were true patrons of the arts. In general, pre-revolutionary Russian culture was a great culture, in its own way incomparable. Anyway, the merchant class characterized Moscow, it was more a Moscow phenomenon than a Petersburg one. Belinsky once wrote, about Moscow and Petersburg, that Moscow does nothing, Petersburg creates nothing . . . What did he mean? Yes, sure, bureaucrats, they’re the ones who create nothing. Petersburg, though, was a city with a certain life, a certain culture. And it should also be said that this city full of uniforms, this snooty city, the capital, with its distinguished places of presence and absence, as we used to say—this city paid hardly any attention to power. In fact, it disliked it outright. Everybody did . . .
In your memoirs you have often mentioned a fairly difficult, torturous scholastic career. Why is that?
I attended a school where I was constantly suspended, but still to this day I’m convinced that they weren’t right to suspend me. The fact is that I had horrible handwriting, I still do. Recently I sent a letter to a writer. He didn’t respond for a long time, I took offense, then I found out from his secretary that he didn’t reply because he hadn’t understood a single word of my letter. So, as I said, I had terrible handwriting . . . But I’m still offended by that writer. I can’t remember anyone—not even Gorky himself, early on, not to mention Mayakovsky, or Blok—I don’t remember any of them ever having secretaries. These new forms of social interaction, in my opinion, are negative. What goes through a secretary is already filtered, secondhand, whereas if someone comes to see you because he wants to talk . . . Gorky said he considered himself a doorman, a custodian. “Someone knocks on the door, I let him in, and in comes a new person with a new, completely new voice. I tell him: sit down, make yourself comfortable . . .” This sense of complete interest in man . . . I advise all writers, on every continent, to keep this wonderful habit . . .
How did you begin your career as a writer?
I was about seventeen. I wrote a bad prose piece that got published in a bad journal, Vesna [Spring].
Bad perhaps, but somehow “historic” for the Russian avant-garde. Isn’t that the same publication where Khlebnikov made his debut in 1908?
Yes, it’s true that all the good writers of the time wound up in that journal. It had a peculiar feature—they didn’t pay for what they published. A displeasing feature, if you like, but interesting. A good thing. It was Shebuev’s journal. He was famous in his own right. In 1905, in a humor magazine he published, there was a “portrait of the working class” with the caption: “His Majesty, the proletariat of all the Russias.” They were able to get it in, barely, considering the times. If I’m not mistaken he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Shebuev was the first publisher I knew. Then I went to see someone called Kulbin. He was a student of Pavlov’s, a good student, and he had a very secure position, he was a doctor for the General Staff. He made a lot of money—he even had, at that time, a private motorboat. He loved art, he was a painter. I brought him two or three of my things. He had a Vladimir but of course it’s not as if he wore the medal around the house. I remember one time, it was already during the war, he did me a secret favor: he granted leave to someone (that someone was my brother). After that, this Kulbin was called in by the military Chief of Staff. The chief asked him by what right had he granted leave to Mr. so-and-so. Kulbin: “Do you plan to write me up?” “Yes.” “Officially?” “Officially.” “Then have the courtesy to stand up and repeat what you just said, and I’ll take a seat, since according to regulation no one is allowed to be seated in the presence of a Vladimir recipient without his permission. And furthermore, I have the right to inspect all the prisons and the bathrooms, men’s and women’s . . .” This man, who died three days after the February Revolution—and he died happy—it was this man who, after looking at some of my things, which in my opinion were very weak, he said to me: “You’re a genius.” I said: “Based on what evidence?” He answered: “Forget about evidence. First of all, don’t give private lessons. I’ll give you forty rubles a month for two years. That’s ten percent of my earnings. And in exchange, you won’t eat in the taverns, because you can’t eat well there. Eat cheese and fresh onions. They have vitamins and they’re filling too.” And this Kulbin was one of the first Futurists. He was friends with Matyushin, with Guro.
So, you were proclaimed a genius. And your studies, in the meantime?
After the Shapovalenko Gymnasium (a bad gymnasium, that’s why I was never suspended there) I enrolled in the Department of Philology at the University of Petersburg. Then I began spending time with Osip Brik, who lived on Zhukovskaya Street. I don’t know what that street is called today, but it should be called Mayakovsky Street, because that’s the street that comes up in his poems . . . Mayakovsky’ll come back to life, go to Petersburg and ask: Where’s Zhukovskaya Street? And they’ll tell him: But that’s been Mayakovsky Street for a million years, because that’s where the poet shot himself, at his beloved’s door. I remember that house, it was a tiny apartment. And Lili Brik was there. Now she’s dead too, she died a few months ago. And Volodya Mayakovsky was there also. He wore a black tunic—before that, there was the notorious yellow shirt, the “poet’s blouse.” Why did he wear it? On the street where Volodya lived there were some typographers, mostly Socialist Democrats or Bolsheviks, but anyway they were politically engaged—they were very good, and since to print well you have to have your arms unencumbered, they wore tunics that went down to their knees. It was a work uniform, black sateen. Everyone said those typographers were excellent. My first book was printed by those same typographers, the “Italians” we called them, because they were open-minded.
Do you remember when you first met Mayakovsky?
Well, it was over sixty years ago. Inventing things is easy; it’s remembering that’s difficult. I’ve never kept a diary, and I regret it, because, as Pushkin said, the flow of the pen halts at the word that will be read with indifference, with coldness. Everyone who writes a diary always makes himself seem smarter than he is.
Do you think that of Tolstoy’s diaries as well?
Yes, Tolstoy kept diaries, but as it turned out he had a secret one that he kept hidden in his boots. I think that his true diaries are his novels. Just as I think that the true diary of an era is poetry. It’s a warmer, more precise, more poignant diary. But back to when I first met Mayakovsky. Someone asked me about that recently. And I gave three different versions. We may have met during one of the public events, the Futurist evenings, and Mayakovsky began doing these public appearances very early, in 1912 or ’13. I remember one of those events, a Futurist evening, near the Kalashnikov Exchange. Baudouin de Courtenay hosted, or rather, participated in the performance. Baudouin was interested in Futurist art, especially in the phenomenon of trans-sense language. So was Kruchenykh, who himself created phenomena, let’s call them, of trans-sense language. That is, he would invent words without meaning, like a baby’s gibberish, revel in sounds as such. If I’m not mistaken, Mayakovsky was there that time too, Khlebnikov, and maybe Kamensky, a happy person, strong, always cheerful. I spoke too. The evening ended in a terrible scandal. We had no fear of scandals. Why not cause a scandal? I mastered the technique. Here it is: you win when you don’t know how far you’re willing to go. That’s always the case—with scandals, brawls, fights, even in war. But if you know a priori when you’re going to stop, then you’ve already lost. At the end of the evening, Baudouin left the room. I, just a simple student at the time, went after him and called after him. He stopped to chat and said that no matter what, the most important thing is democracy. That politics is what matters. “What you believe,” he went on, “is misguided. But I must admit that you have your own window on the world. Eventually you’ll see something from there. And you must preserve this gift.” He said this to me personally. Baudouin de Courtenay was a scholar, a great linguist, a unique person, very proud, like a typical Pole. At one time, his calling cards said: “Baudouin de Courtenay, King of Jerusalem.” He claimed to have documentation proving he had descended from the first kings of Jerusalem. His ancestors had lost all their possessions in the attempt to prove it. Anyway, Baudouin told me that the most important things are science and democracy. At the time, poetry was a diversion. Later, we came up against the very big, complex problems of reality. And not only were we foaming at the mouth, we were literally exhausted.
And the other versions of how you met Mayakovsky?
You see, in 1914, I was serving in the armored division. Someone told me that a certain Brik really wanted to meet me. I said: “But I know him well, Brik!” He was a soldier who was famous, among us, for having wrecked three cars in one go—he got in a car that was in gear, it lurched forward and hit another two. So I went to see Brik—not the one who had crashed the cars—and there I met Mayakovsky, whom I already knew, but not personally, just from seeing him on stage. Not our acquaintance, then, but certainly our friendship, began at the Briks’. Speaking of the Briks, there are some people, in Russia, who don’t like them, who speak badly of them, people who don’t like Mayakovsky. But Volodya, before he died, wrote in his note: “Lilichka, love me.” I mean, we don’t have the right to dispose of the hearts of our great poets. We don’t have the right to separate Dante and Beatrice. Of course, actual institutions for divorce exist. But if we let poets divorce, we have to give up poetry. And Mayakovsky loved Lili for a long time, tenderly, and as I wrote in Zoo, poetry is always written on the road to love, and we have no right to separate love from poetry. Moreover, we don’t know why birds sing. Today people think that a nightingale sings to say: Here I am, here I am, and let no other nightingales come and bother me. But perhaps it’s singing for the female nightingales, or the baby ones. Or simply because it likes to sing. We don’t know anything.
You mentioned a “technique of scandal.” It seems that Mayakovsky was an expert in scandal as well. What was the role of the audience in all this?
One time, Mayakovsky performed at a women’s institute. A good institute, the oldest in Russia, where women were able to earn diplomas. I wouldn’t call it a flop. It was a mega-flop. A disaster. Mayakovsky declaimed a poem in which he says that the world will never be rid of schoolgirls. He loathed them. And in another poem he said that one day, the world, the nation, would turn to itself and say: My God, what have I done! And then he, Mayakovsky, would write something beautiful that everyone would understand. Another time, at another Futurist evening, Mayakovsky and I walked through the audience, and we didn’t exactly have to elbow our way through, but it was definitely like a crowded square. On that occasion, Mayakovsky got shot down—how can I put it—not with blanks, but with real bullets. And yet they knew he was a talented poet. He was tall, handsome, with broad shoulders, a slender torso, a nice build, and an extraordinary voice . . . You asked me to talk about the past, you see. The past is multifaceted, complex. Let me tell you a story. In Petersburg, there was a huge bar of gold, I don’t remember its exact weight, but it was very, very heavy. After some time they wondered where they should put it so that it didn’t get stolen, and then they decided to just pretend it was copper. And that bar’s still there, for over a hundred and fifty years, and no one has ever touched it, it has never occurred to anybody that it could be gold. And in art there’s gold that isn’t recognized as such, but it’s still gold. Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov—they were gold. As well as other great poets of ours. As a child, Volodya went hungry. He was still very young when he entered the Communist party, and his mother was in the Socialist-Revolutionary party. One time, his mother, along with some others, organized an escape from a women’s prison. She sewed clothing for the inmates so that they could change as soon as they were out. His mother had her political views, he had his. And so Volodya couldn’t see his mother. Otherwise it would have complicated matters for both of them. He had no house in the city that was home. His mother was a beautiful woman, educated, from the Danilevsky family. Mayakovsky’s own father came from a line of Cossacks. One of his ancestors, a high-ranking soldier in the army during Elizabeth’s reign, had taken part in a revolt. Volodya’s mother was a very modest woman. I went to see her a few years after Volodya’s death. The house was in bad shape. Thoughtlessly, I said “Are things all right?” She understood what I meant and replied: “I can’t put anything in here that Volodya never saw.” It’s hard for me to talk about these things. It’s true, life can’t be changed . . . There was also Khlebnikov, one of the Futurists. His father was a famous Orientalist. And the blind Burliuk. Hylaea. A tiny village on the steppe. The “stone women.” One of these “stone women” was put on Khlebnikov’s grave at the Aleksandr Nevsky cemetery . . . The past emerges through details, particulars . . . In Petersburg, in pre-revolutionary Petersburg, there were brutal street fights. My grandfather, who was a gardener, lived by the Aleksandr Nevsky monastery, where the religious academy was. Across the way, there was the Okhta, the carpenters’ neighborhood, with the church of St. Joseph, their patron saint. And there, on the ice, future carpenters would duke it out with future priests. These were the rules of the fight: naturally, you couldn’t hide anything up your sleeve, that was strictly prohibited; if someone fell to the ground, you couldn’t hit him under any circumstances; when one of them realized he couldn’t fight anymore, he would take off his cap and set it on the ground, that was the sign that he had given up. But when someone was completely enraged and wanted to go all the way, he would throw his cap as far as he could and yell “To the death!” And that’s what the group of Futurists was like: Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Kamensky . . .
Viktor Borisovich, why this strange chain of associations from the Futurists to the brawls between seminarians and carpenters?
Life isn’t just long, but also a multitude, multifaceted. There were the Futurists, there were the Acmeists, and there was that seminary on the Neva, right at the river bend. And my grandfather would talk about these fights between young men, one against the other, with very strict rules . . . Life has many stories, like a building . . . We talk about the future, but at the same time we belong to the past. The bells of the monastery would ring, some studied to become priests, took exams, the other shore of the Neva was filling up with factories, and reality is this concurrence of different times . . .