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.