The Mayakovsky Tapes by Robert Littell

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on November 22, 2016

Robert Littell has written some excellent spy novels. Be warned: The Mayakovsky Tapes is not a spy novel. I’m not sure what it is.

The narrator of The Mayakovsky Tapes tells us that he smuggled recordings out of Soviet Russia in 1955 that, at the age of 86, he feels safe revealing to public. In the post-Soviet age, he assumes, few people remember the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The novel purports to be transcriptions of discussions that took place in 1953 with four of Mayakovsky’s lovers.

According to Wikipedia, Mayakovsky’s work “regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Communist Party” before the Revolution and for some time thereafter. His relationship with the Soviet system became less sanguine toward the end of the 1920s, as he confronted cultural censorship and the government’s support of “Socialist realism” as the Soviet Union’s preferred art form.

The women knew Mayakovsky at different times in the 1920s. Mayakovsky met Lilya Brik while she was married to Osip Brik, who became Mayakovsky’s publisher. Mayakovsky met Osip when they served together after being drafted in 1916. Mayakovsky later began living with the couple and, with Osip’s tacit approval, had an affair with Lilya. As Lilya explains it, he was one of several lovers Lilya entertained during the course of her open marriage.

Mayakovsky traveled to New York in 1925 to give a poetry reading. There he met and began a secret affair with Russian émigré Elly Jones, a model and interpreter. According to the novel, they were inseparable for eight weeks.

In 1928, Mayakovsky visited Paris and met another Russian émigré, Tatiana Yakovleva, who was working as a model for Chanel. Tatiana explains that she refused to give up her virginity to Mayaskovsky despite his protestations of love and proposals of marriage, although she considered their relationship to be deeply intimate.

Mayakovsky’s last lover of the four was Nora (Veronica) Polonskaya, an actress in Russia with whom he had an affair at the end of the decade. At that point, Mayakovsky had fallen out of favor with the Soviet government and was being openly belittled by audiences who accepted the Soviet propaganda that condemned him as an elitist.

The bare facts of Mayakovsky’s love life can be gleaned from the historical record (i.e., Wikipedia), so the question is whether the novel adds something of artistic value to the cold facts. During much of the novel, the women debate Mayakovsky’s personality, his talents as a lover and poet, and his fate. The women have each shared some form of intimacy with the poet, and a certain cattiness predictably erupts at regular intervals during the recordings. That’s not enough to carry a story. In fact, nothing approaching a story develops as the women chat about their respective relationships with Mayakovsky. At least, nothing like an interesting story develops.

At the two-thirds point, I was wondering whether Littell had changed the course of his writing career by choosing to write the sexual biography of a Russian poet rather than a spy novel. I was heartened when Littell took a break from the four women to reveal the imagined contents of Mayakovsky’s GPU file (which reads much like Mayakovsky’s Wikipedia page), but apart from a recommendation that Mayakovsky be shortened by the length of a head, the file adds little to the reader’s knowledge.

Fans of historical celebrity name dropping might enjoy mentions of Isadora Duncan and Georgia O’Keeffe and various American jazz musicians and Russian poets and artists. Fans of Russian history might enjoy the account of Pasternak berating Mayakovsky for supporting the Revolution long after it became clear that Stalin was not true to its goals. Fans of good storytelling will need to look elsewhere.

Considering that the novel consists of nothing but dialog, my first complaint is that none of the dialog seems natural. Littell is a good prose stylist, but people don’t speak as if their words were written by a good prose stylist. My second complaint is that the novel is of academic interest but stirs no passion (except, perhaps, for fans of Mayakovsky’s poetry, if any still exist). My final complaint is that listening to four women praise and condemn the poet they spent time with just isn’t compelling fiction.

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