Valerian Osinsky
(Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
Sverdlov’s last letter about the real day took about a month to come true. Valerian Osinsky wrote his in late February 1917, at the time of its fulfillment. Born “Valerian Obolensky” in the family of a veterinarian of noble birth, he had debated Kerzhentsev in his Moscow gymnasium, shared a prison cell with Bukharin, and served as an “agitator” in the Swamp after the 1905 Revolution. He was famously tall, studious, radical, and aloof. In February 1917, he was thirty years old and married to a fellow revolutionary, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova. They had a five-year-old son, Vadim, whom they called “Dima.” His correspondent, Anna Mikhailovna Shaternikova, was in her mid-twenties, a devoted Marxist, and a volunteer nurse. They had met a few months earlier in a hospital in Yalta, where he was being treated for tuberculosis. They were in love, but could not, for the time being, be together. They knew that their individual fates depended on the future of mankind as a whole. They were certain that that future was near, but did not know that it had already reached Petrograd.102 Osinsky’s letter contains his prose translation of the last three stanzas of Émile Verhaeren’s “Blacksmith” (“Le Forgeron”), with detailed line-by-line commentary:
The mob, whose sacred fury always rises above itself, is an immensely inspired force, projected by the will of those to come, that will erect, with its merciless hands, a new world of insatiable utopia….
The blacksmith, whose hope does not ever stray toward doubt or fear, sees before him, as if they were already here, the days when the simplest ethical commandments will become the foundation of human existence, serene and harmonious….
Lit up by that luminous faith, the flames of which he has been stoking for many a year in his forge, by the side of the road, next to the tilled fields,
The blacksmith, huge and massive, is hammering with mighty, full blows—as if he were tempering the steel of human souls—the immense blades of patience and silence.
This poem, according to Osinsky, is a prophetic depiction of “the psychology of revolution.” The passage on the power of the mob confirms that “one of life’s greatest pleasures” is to join collective humanity in its sacred fury. The “insatiability” of utopia refers both to the boundlessness of human aspiration and the “pitiless arms of the crowd.” And what is liberation if not the embrace of “the simplest ethical commandments”? “For thousands of years, different moral teachers (Socrates, Christ, Buddha, etc.) have been preaching so-called good,” but their prescriptions have been mutually contradictory and incomplete because they have been based on life in “antagonistic” societies. It has been “savage morality, slave morality, or beggars’ morality—not the morality of a rational, free, and developed society, and thus not fully simple, not primary.” True virtue is contingent on revolution. “Only in the world of insatiable utopia will the simplest ethical rules become real and free from exceptions and contradictions.”
The same is true of love, the “moving force” of ethics in a society liberated from social contradictions. At present, it is circumscribed by personal interests, limited in forms of expression, and “mixed with hatred (albeit the ‘sacred’ kind).” “Over there,” it will “reveal without shame all of its profound tenderness and its charity without embellishment, without the tinkling bells of magnanimity and philanthropy.” This idea seems utopian because it sounds “ethereal, ‘illuminated,’ and a bit banal,” but of course it is not a utopia because all it means is that people will be able to “live and work joyfully and intensely.” It will be “the kind of ‘good time when any grief is easy to bear,’… a time of real social health, as opposed to having one’s head up in the clouds.” (The “easy to bear” quotation comes from Knut Hamsun’s Victoria, a universal “student” favorite about the life-sustaining power of ethereal love.)
This “luminous faith” (lucide croyance) is not only faith “but also certitude and clairvoyance.” “It is with this luminous, radiant, burning certitude in his eyes that the huge, massive (gourd), heavy, and lumbering blacksmith … swings his hammer.” At the end of his letter, Osinsky claims that his “sometimes spare, inaccurate, and not always rhythmical” translation is much truer to the original than Valery Briusov’s smooth, rhymed version. “You cannot parrot the blacksmith, you have to be him—him … dont l’éspoir ne dévie vers les doutes ni les affres—jamais [him, whose hope does not ever stray toward doubt or fear].” To stress the point, Osinsky suddenly changes his tone and adds: “Tell me, A.M., does this blacksmith—énorme et gourd—remind you of anyone by any chance?”103
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But the tallest, biggest, bluntest, and loudest of Russia’s blacksmiths was the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In January 1914, “handsome and twenty-two,” he arrived in Odessa as part of a Futurist traveling show also featuring David Burliuk and Vasily Kamensky. “All three,” according to a newspaper report, “were wearing top hats, yellow blouses, and overcoats with radishes in their lapels.” As they were walking along the embankment on the first evening of their visit, Kamensky noticed “an absolutely extraordinary girclass="underline" tall, shapely, with magnificent, shining eyes—in short, a real beauty.” He pointed her out to Mayakovsky, who “turned around, looked her slowly up and down, and then suddenly seemed to become extremely agitated. ‘Listen, you two stay here, or do whatever you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you back at the hotel in … well, in a while.’”104
The girl’s name was Maria Denisova, but Mayakovsky called her “La Gioconda.” She was twenty years old. Originally from Kharkov, she had moved to Odessa to attend a gymnasium but had later dropped out and enrolled in sculpture classes at an art studio.105 The next day, the three Futurists were invited to dinner at her older sister’s house. According to Kamensky,
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Maria Denisova
The dinner at La Gioconda’s turned into a triumph of poetry. We spent most of the time reciting poems and saying very special, festive things. Volodia was inspired…. He talked a great deal and was very smart and witty…. I will never forget the way he read his poetry that evening.
When we got back to our hotel, it took us a long time to get over the tremendous impression Maria had made on us.
Burliuk was silent, but looked meaningfully at Volodia, who kept pacing nervously back and forth, unsure about what to do or how to deal with this sudden eruption of love…. He kept asking quietly over and over again:
“What should I do? What can I do? Should I write a letter? But wouldn’t that look stupid? I love you. What more can I say?”106
He did write a letter—not at all like the one from Tatiana to Onegin (“I am writing to you, what more can I say”), but a love letter nonetheless. He called it “The Thirteenth Apostle,” but then, when the censors objected, renamed it A Cloud in Pants. Its addressee was God, among many others, and its subject was the end of love—and everything else.