Posts Tagged ‘Bengt Jangfeldt’

Couldn’t resist a last-minute Christmas post with two seasonal holiday cards from from faraway friends. The first is from award-winning author (and translator) Bengt Jangfeldt, writing from Stockholm. He cites the words of our mutual friend, the Polish poet and friend Adam Zagajewski, who died in 2021 (still hard to write those words), whose lines from “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” translated by the matchless Clare Cavanagh, were never more timely, never more urgent.

The second is from Oslo-based Swedish poet and translator Håkan Sandell, and features a more traditional winter image, a young girl braving the northern winter weather and Arctic darkness with a candle.

Wherever you are, I hope the holiday brings peace, love, and healing for our mutilated world.

She picked up the pieces. Lili Brik and Mayakovsky in happier times, 1915.

Bengt Jangfeldt wrote me a note to say he will be coming to town this autumn on Stanford-related business. We’re lucky to have him. The leading Swedish author, twice a winner of the August Prize and also a recipient of the Swedish Academy’s biography prize (and also a dear friend), is the author of biographies of Axel Munthe: The Road to San Michele (2003), Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Biography (2007), and also Язык есть Бог [Language is God], a biography of Joseph Brodsky (2010), and The Hero of Budapest: The Triumph and Tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg (2012). He is also the editor of Love is the Heart of Everything: Correspondence Between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915-1930. He is the Swedish translator the poetry of Mayakovsky (with Gunnar Harding), as well as the poetry and prose of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky.

Master biographer

In anticipation of the visit from one of my favorite people, I wondered how his book on Mayakovsky, poet of the Russian Revolution, had fared since he gave me a copy in Stockholm last year. (I discussed his talk about it here.) To my surprise, I ran across “The Bad Boy of Russian Poetry” in the New York Review of Books, written by yet another friend, Michael Scammell:

When Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930, the news sent shock waves through the Soviet Union. Ilya Ehrenburg, who knew of Mayakovsky’s notorious gambling habit, thought he might have been playing Russian roulette with his beloved Mauser pistol and lost his bet. But Mayakovsky’s suicide note, written two days before his death, suggested otherwise. Asking his mother and sisters to forgive him and sardonically asking for there to be no gossip (“the deceased hated gossip”), Mayakovsky had appended a few lines from an unfinished poem:

The game, as they say,
Is over.
The love-boat has come to grief
On the reefs of convention.
Life and I are quits
And there’s no point
In nursing grievances.

The word “love-boat” suggested romantic reasons, but also created a mystery, for Mayakovsky’s tangled love life was mostly unknown to the general public. At the time of his death he was simultaneously involved with three different women: his longtime mistress, Lili Brik, with whom he had spent most of his adult life in a bohemian ménage à trois (together with her husband, Osip Brik), but who was just then involved with a movie director; Tatyana Yakovleva, a striking young White Russian whom Mayakovsky had met in Paris and asked to marry him, but who had just married a Frenchman instead; and Veronika Polonskaya, a sultry young stage actress, also married, to whom he had also proposed marriage. Emotionally he was a wreck, and his death might have been precipitated by his relations with any one of his paramours.

But that wasn’t the only mystery. In the tightly controlled Soviet Union, suicide was seen as a crime and an act of defiance, an assertion of personal freedom that contradicted the image of the state as a workers’ paradise. Why would someone as famous and popular as Mayakovsky have killed himself, even under provocation? What most of his readers didn’t know was that for the first time since the October Revolution, Mayakovsky was seriously disaffected. Stalin had started to purge his regime of “Trotskyists” and other perceived enemies, and two recent satirical plays of Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, had aroused official anger with their frank criticisms of government leaders and corrupt bureaucrats. His enemies whispered that he, too, was a secret Trotskyist and an elitist, out of touch with his proletarian base.

He was already being shadowed by the OGPU (the secret police), and its agents swarmed through his apartment the moment his death became known. They had long since penetrated Mayakovsky’s inner circle. Osip Brik had been an agent of the secret police in the early 1920s and he and Lili still maintained close contact with them; and the official death notice was signed by no fewer than three secret agents, in addition to a couple of Mayakovsky’s literary allies.

Michael Scammell and I had met, briefly and intermittently, during my years in London, where I volunteered my humble editorial services at the journal where he was editor and founder, Index on Censorship. He was already a bigshot and, as I recall, already working on his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We’ve corresponded in the years since.

He doesn’t stint on the passages about an important source for the Bengt’s book, the legendary Lili Brik herself:

Solzhenitsyn’s biographer

Jangfeldt introduces her in chapter two of his book, and she almost runs away with it, in part because she is such an arresting character herself. “I saw right away that Volodya was a poet of genius,” Jangdfeldt quotes her as saying in her unpublished autobiography,

but I didn’t like him. I didn’t like loud-mouthed people…. I didn’t like the fact that he was so big that people turned to look at him in the street, I didn’t like the fact that he listened to his own voice, I didn’t even like his name—Mayakovsky—so noisy and so like a pseudonym, vulgar one at that.

Nevertheless, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Lili would have an affair with the brawny young poet. When told about it, Brik allegedly said, “How could you refuse anything to that man!” But this was more serious than her earlier liaisons. Mayakovsky was an enormously persistent and demanding (and jealous) lover … Lili was happy to sleep with Mayakovsky, but held him at a certain length for nearly three years before suggesting he move in with herself and Osip, an arrangement that lasted on and off for the rest of his life. Meanwhile she lost no time in persuading her protégé to cut his hair and throw away his yellow blouse. She arranged for a dentist to make new teeth for him and bought him fancy new clothes to wear, so that he began to look more like an English dandy than the bohemian of old (though remaining just as wild in temperament).

I’ll likely be writing more about Lili Brik, one of Russia’s great literary widows – we have another mutual friend, Ellendea Proffer. The NYRB review concludes: “Jangfeldt devotes several chapters to his last agonizing months, tracking the events of his last fateful week day by day, until the poet concluded there was no other way to resolve both his emotional and his political dilemmas. Jangfeldt marshals the huge variety of sources he has amassed to create a gripping account of the poet’s tumultuous life and tragic death. …  this book restores Mayakovsky to his rightful place in the pantheon of Russian letters and does him full justice.” Read the whole thing here.

A very cold August in Stockholm: Bengt, Humble Moi, Alexander Deriev, and Igor Pomerantsev (Photo: Liana Pomerantsev)

From a postcard in the new collection. Brodsky ties a shoelace on the morning of his departure from Leningrad in 1972. (Copyright: Lev Poliakov)

When the Soviet Union expelled the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in 1972, he already had a few friends waiting for him in the West. One of them, Diana Myers, would remain a confidante until the Nobel laureate’s death in 1996. The London home she shared with her husband, the translator Alan Myers, became his English pied-à-terre.

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford has recently acquired Diana Myers’ collection of Brodsky’s papers, including letters, photos, drafts, manuscripts, artwork and published and unpublished poems.

“We were keenly interested in adding the Joseph Brodsky papers collected by his friend Diana Myers to our vast archives on Russia and making them accessible right away,” said Eric Wakin, the Robert H. Malott Director of the Hoover Library & Archives.

“With Hoover’s significant holdings on the poet in its Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman Collection, and the recently acquired Joseph Brodsky papers from the Katilius Family Archive at the Green Library, we’re honored that Stanford has become a notable center for Brodsky studies in the United States.”

The new acquisition documents Brodsky’s enormous capacity for friendship and his long love affair with the English language.

“I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world,” he once told an American student visiting Leningrad in 1970 – strong words for the man who would become one of the preeminent Russian poets of the last century.

Brodsky, who settled in the United States, was fascinated by the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. His landmark poem “Elegy to John Donne” was written in 1962, when he knew very little of Donne’s work. It brought him international attention. He began translating and writing English poetry during his 1964-65 internal exile in Norenskaya, near the Arctic Circle.

When the newlywed Myers arrived in London from the Soviet Union in 1967, she was carrying an armful of flowers to lay at the feet of John Donne’s effigy in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The specific request from Brodsky was her first stop in her new homeland.

In a letter Brodsky wrote to Alan Myers a few months before his exile, he requested more information about George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughn. He sought guidance in finding the best editions of Ben Jonson, Henry King, Walter Raleigh and John Wilmot. An undated and unpublished poem in the collection seems to be an experiment written under their sway.

On another page in the collection, he adds his own illustrations to a few passages from Shakespeare, who anticipated the metaphysical poets.

Fifteen pages of holograph poems in the collection document the slow progression from an idea to a finished poem, with notations, corrections and amendments – all likely of interest to Brodsky scholars. “You can see how it worked, to the final version,” said archivist Lora Soroka. “It’s something that gives insight into his work.”

“It’s everyday life – everyday life when he was there, in England,” she said. “This is definitely our star collection – not big, but stellar.”

The collection also includes 70 letters from Brodsky, as well as correspondence to him from such figures as Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Swedish translator and author Bengt Jangfeldt, Australian poet Les Murray and others; 25 pages of notes and drafts; five self-portraits, a landscape, and a still life, all in black chalk; an elaborate wedding card he created and illustrated for the couple; a transcript of his 1964 Soviet trial for “parasitism;” and other records.

Brodsky in 1988.

Friendship and hospitality

Myers, who died of cancer in 2013, was born Diana Abaeva, ethnically an Ossetian, whose prominent father had been politically purged and shot under Stalin’s regime in the 1930s. She grew up in Moscow and Tblisi, in the Caucasus Mountains – Brodsky once traveled to Tblisi to visit when he was impatient for her return to Leningrad.

Friends recalled that she was small and slender, with straight dark hair, an aquiline nose, and a radiant smile that was slightly dimmed by nicotine stains, for she smoked almost as ferociously as Brodsky did.

Like Brodsky, she lived for literature and was impractical, even unworldly. One friend recalled she had a slightly languid “Eastern” air. On one page in the collection Brodsky calls her “queen of the couch.”

She was “very intelligent and thoughtful and idiosyncratic,” said University College London’s Faith Wigzell, who had been a close friend of Brodsky’s as well as a colleague of Myers.

Her great gift was for hospitality as well as intellectual conversation: “She was the most relaxed and welcoming hostess. Her home was an international hall of residence. People came to just sit around. She was an excellent cook,” said Wigzell.

For Brodsky, Myers was a means to continue the literary and cultural conversations that had started in Leningrad. In exile, he would continue to consult her, phoning from around the world to read his latest poem and get her opinion. He said she had insights unlike anyone else’s.

Alan Myers, who died in 2010, became an important early translator for Brodsky’s poetry and prose, publishing in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement. In one letter, Brodsky told Myers that he would be paid “substantially, I think” for his New Yorker work, and he reminded his translator that he was looking after his interests.

Brodsky’s “In England” cycle is dedicated to the couple. In the “East Finchley” section, both make an appearance in their London home. In addition, the sections “York: In Memoriam W.H. Auden” and “Stone Villages,” recall trips the three took to W.H. Auden’s birthplace in the northern city of York, an ancient Roman stronghold. (Auden had been Brodsky’s mentor, protector, and friend – and another vital link to England.)

“Joseph found our sleepy residence very relaxing,” Alan Myers recalled in an interview from 2003-04. He remembered him as “a radiant source of wit, generosity of soul and exaltation.”

“No one who knew him well thought it other than a privilege to share the planet with him,” he said.

***

The poet with Lili Brik in 1915

Vladimir Mayakovsky was the celebrated hero poet of the Russian Revolution. His suicide in 1930, at the age of 37, rocked the Soviet world. What had happened? Had he become disillusioned with the new order he had championed? Or was it foul play? The Soviets put forth a different story – romantic disappointment. But the truth, as always, is more complicated.

Enter his biographer Bengt Jangfeldt, perhaps the foremost Mayakovsky expert in the world. I had the good fortune to visit Bengt in Stockholm this summer. He is one of the foremost authors in Sweden, and undoubtedly one of Scandinavia’s most generous spirits. He was not well that day, however, so we had to postpone a whirlwind tour of Stockholm for another visit and chat over coffee at his apartment in the old part of the city.

Biographer Bengt

Before I left, he pressed the English translation of his Mayakovsky: A Biography (Chicago) into my hands. It hadn’t been published at the time of Bengt’s short visit to Stanford three years ago (I wrote about his lectures here and here). According to Stanford’s Marjorie Perloff, “this biography is essential reading not only for students of modernist poetry but also for anyone interested in the relationship of literature to life in the former Soviet Union.”

I haven’t yet had a chance to read the 600+ page volume, but I share my guilty secret: I flipped to the end to see how Bengt would tell how the poet came to end his life with a bullet through the heart. An excerpt, which includes Bengt’s correspondence with Mayakovsky’s lover Lili Brik:

“How many times did I not hear the word ‘suicide’ from Mayakovsky,” Lili wrote. “That he would take his own life. You’re old at thirty-five! I shall live till I’m thirty, no more.” His terror of becoming old was closely connected to his fear of losing his attraction for women. “Before the age of twenty-five a man is loved by all women,” he stated shortly before his suicide to a twenty-five-year-old fellow writer. “After twenty-five he is also loved by all – except the one he is in love with.” …

The urge to commit suicide is the dark sounding board in Mayakovsky’s life, and the theme of suicide the leitmotif of his writings, from the first line to the last. The tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poem “Clearance Sale” (“Years and years from now/in short, when I am no longer alive – / dead from hunger,/or a pistol shot –/professors […] will study/me/how,/when,/where I came from”). “The Backbone-Flute” (“More often I think:/it might be far better/ to punctuate my end with a bullet” [trans. George Reavey]), “Man” (“The heart longs for the bullet/ and the throat hallucinates about a razor”), the film Not Born for Money, “About This,” the film script How Are You?, the unfinished play Comedy with Suicide, The Bedbug. The list of works and quotations is almost endless.

“The idea of suicide,” Lili declared, “was a chronic disease with Mayakovsky, and like all chronic diseases it grew worse in unfavorable circumstances.” Underlying the urge to suicide was not only the fear of aging but also the feeling of not being understood, of not being needed, of loving as few are capable of loving without feeling that he was loved in return.

Mayakovsky was a maximalist: he gave all that was in his power and demanded much in return. “Countless numbers of people loved him and were fond of him,” Lili wrote, “but that was just a drop in the ocean for someone with an ‘insatiable thief’ in his soul, who wanted everyone who didn’t read him to read him, all those to come who didn’t come, and that the one he thought didnt’ love him should love him.” Love, art, revolution – to Mayakovsky, everything was a game with life as the stake. He played as befitted a compulsive gambler: intensely, without mercy. And he knew that if he lost, the result was hopelessness and despair.

Biographer Bengt

Bengt Jangfeldt – the eminent Swedish author of recent books on Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, World War II Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, and Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky – talks to Russia about Russians in a great interview for Novaya Gazeta a week ago here. We’ve written about Bengt before here and here and here. The only problem is: the new interview is in Russian. With trepidation, I offer a translation of a few excerpts below:

***

“Friendship with China – it’s perfect for Russia, but … this is not the past of Russian culture nor its future. Russia and the West have  interconnected cultural values. This relationship is inevitable.”

***

“Russia, unlike in Germany, did not deal with its past. Wallenberg is just one of the many victims of the Stalinist terror and the Soviet regime. To understand this fact today is not very easy: the archives are still not readily available, and because of this, these books are always relevant. I think that Russia will have difficulty moving forward without such proceedings. It’s like a stone that pulls downward. For example, the recent history with ‘Memorial’ suggests that this problem still affects the life of the country.”

***

“I once had a conversation with Brodsky about Russia, we often talked about it. It was in the 90s. And Brodsky made the following statement: ‘Do not underestimate the inferiority complex of my former fellow citizens.'”

***

He took the bait.

Jangfeldt: “To take one striking example of his [Mayakovsky’s] life, when he changed his attitude to the Soviet regime and the Soviet regime to him. It happened in the winter of 1922, when Lenin said of his poem ‘Prozasedavshiesya’: ‘As for poetry, I do not know, but from a political point of view, it’s good’ – and Mayakovsky was very happy. It would be impossible for us. If someone said to me: ‘You know, the Prime Minister is very fond of your book, and so now we are going to print large runs of it’ – that would be terrible!

Inteviewer: Why is that awful?

Jangfeldt: Because he should not play any role either in my life or in the life of the publisher.”

***

Read the rest – either in Russian or with Google Translate – here. (And a hat tip to Andrius Katilius for the article.)

I’ve written about the Russian poet Regina Derieva since her death last December – here and here.  According to our mutual friend, the prominent Swedish author Bengt Jangfeldt, she was a poet “who in her best poems achieved that true metaphysical quality which, according to T.S. Eliot, is the alloy of thought and poetry at a very high temperature.” I have been fascinated by this utterly unique and uncompromising poetic voice since I learned of the poet’s existence, a few days after her death, from her husband. Now I am thrilled to announce that her papers have come to Stanford. I tell the story in this week’s Times Literary Supplement:

The Russian poet Regina Derieva was born on the Black Sea in Odessa, and enjoyed the shifting rhythms of the sea: “Water is the ideal apparel. However many times you get into it, it’s the same”. Her passion for water was shared by her epistolary friend, Joseph Brodsky, who grew up alongside St Petersburg’s canals and spent as much time as he could in Venice, where he is buried on the cemetery island of San Michele. Derieva, whom Brodsky called “a great poet”, viewed a very different landscape, however: from the age of six, she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, “perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city”, according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn “the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance”.

A few days after Derieva’s sudden death last December at the age of sixty-four, I received a letter from her husband, Alexander Deriev, and our ensuing correspondence eventually led to the Stanford Libraries’ acquisition of this astonishing poet’s archive. A single cardboard box postmarked Märsta, Sweden, is all that remains of a long and productive literary life, augmented by a few files of unpublished manuscripts, photographs, letters and drawings Deriev brought with him to California in his backpack.

There is a reason for the paucity of papers in a lifetime that should have left a mountain of them. Derieva’s life encompassed the upheavals of the past century, but she added an idiosyncratic twist: at each fork in the road, this outcast among outcasts made a choice – and that choice, or as often necessity, took her even farther from the pack.

I’ll have more about her in future posts – but meanwhile, please read the rest of the story in the TLS here.