Outwardly, the status of women in prerevolutionary Russia, even among the educated urban strata, was low— they had not won the right to vote nor did they have equal rights with men for education and labor. But within the elite and bohemian groups of Moscow and St. Petersburg the situation was different: the participation of gifted women in the cultural discourse was keenly welcome.
A veteran of the prerevolutionary Futurist movement, Benedikt Livshits, later recalled in his book,
The great tragic actress Alisa Koonen (a star of Alexander Tairov’s expressionist theater) maintained: “Goncharova did not look like an Amazon at all. She attracted people with her femininity, gentleness, and pure Russian beauty. Her hair was combed back, she had a thin face with big black eyes.”36 And art critic Abram Efros described Rozanova this way: “Her image was distinguished by total alertness and noiseless restlessness. Truly she resembled a mouse, housewifely and anxious. Exhibitions and paintings were her murine kingdom.”37
Another deviation from the feminist stereotype was that most of the Russian Amazons were apparently happy in their heterosexual relationships. The most famous couple was, of course, Goncharova and her comrade-in-arms of many years, Mikhail Larionov, the royal couple of the Russian avant-garde, who moved to Paris in 1917 and created some of Diaghilev’s most famous productions, such as Prokofiev’s
The relationships of the other Amazons were legendary, too: Varvara Stepanova and one of the leaders of the Russian avant-garde, Alexander Rodchenko, Nadezhda Udaltsova and the artist Alexander Drevin. Rodchenko, who was a friend of Udaltsova’s, later recalled that she “spoke of Cubism softly and ingratiatingly. As if a living confirmation of Cubism, she had a very interesting face of a nun with close-set eyes, looking with two completely different expressions, a slightly deformed Cubist nose and thin, nunnish lips.”39 According to the severe Rodchenko, Udaltsova “understood Cubism more than the rest and worked more seriously than the rest.”40
The fate of Udaltsova and her husband was tragic: Drevin was arrested on the night of February 16, 1938, and he was executed ten years later in a Stalinist prison. Udaltsova was not told of her husband’s death, and she continued submitting appeals for his pardon for almost twenty years, until she learned the horrible truth in 1956. But before her death in 1961, taking advantage of the Khrushchev “Thaw,” Udaltsova managed to have an exhibition of her own works (1958) and to show her husband’s paintings after a gap of a quarter century. It was only then that Udaltsova and Drevin were talked about again, only to be soon forgotten for another thirty years, until their full canonization after Gorbachev’s perestroika.
From the beginning of their rule, the Bolsheviks were reluctant to allow leading cultural figures to travel abroad. They were more lenient with the avant-garde: first, because they were mostly lefties themselves, and therefore more trustworthy; second, the authorities did not consider them very important—even if they did not return to Russia, it would be no great loss.
It was another thing when the major mainstream writers and poets, respected and popular even before the revolution, started heading west: Bunin, Alexander Kuprin, Konstantin Balmont, Merezhkovsky and his wife, Hippius. This became embarrassing for the Soviets, especially when they received the following memorandum in June 1921 from the head of the foreign department of the Cheka, or secret police, who handled requests for travel abroad. “Taking into account that the writers who have gone abroad are waging an active campaign against Soviet Russia and some of them, such as Balmont, Kuprin, and Bunin, stoop to the vilest lies, the All-Russian Cheka does not consider it possible to satisfy such requests.”1
Now it was the Politburo, headed by Lenin, that discussed every candidate who asked to travel to the West. The case involving Alexander Blok, the forty-year-old leader of Russian Symbolism who was perhaps the most beloved poet in Russia at the time, was most troubling.
Blok, who considered the old Russia a “horrible world,” had welcomed the Bolshevik revolution and supported it with two of its arguably most impressive poetic manifestoes: the dense and intensely lyrical narrative poem
But the Bolsheviks still did not trust Blok, even arresting him—albeit briefly—in 1919 on suspicion of conspiracy. In 1921, Blok, exhausted and malnourished, developed septic endocarditis (inflammation of the inner lining of the heart) and inflammation of the brain (meningial encephalitis). Gorky and Lunacharsky appealed to Lenin to let the poet go to Finland for treatment. At first the Politburo refused. Then Lenin and his comrades relented, but too late: on August 7, Blok died, mourned as a victim of the Bolshevik regime by many. As Lunacharsky bitterly commented in his secret letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party: “There will be no doubt and no refutation of the fact that we killed Russia’s most talented poet.”2 Thus Blok, a fellow traveler, became the first widely acknowledged great martyr of Soviet cultural policies. The second major figure to appear on that list was the poet Nikolai Gumilev, thirty-five, who was executed on August 25, 1921, with sixty other “counterrevolutionaries,” accused of supporting the recently routed anti-Soviet Kronstadt uprising.
Before the revolution, Gumilev became well known as leader of the Acmeist movement in poetry, which he founded with his wife, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam, to bring “beautiful clarity” in opposition to the fogs of poetic Symbolism. An adventurer and conquistador by nature, but awkward looking with long limbs and crossed eyes, Gumilev was transformed by action, being a born leader. As a young man he had gone on three dangerous expeditions to Africa (as it has recently been revealed, most probably on assignment from Russian intelligence agencies)3 and at the very start of World War I, where he had volunteered, he was twice awarded the highest medal for valor, the St. George Cross.
In 1917, Gumilev was in Paris, where he befriended Larionov and Goncharova. She drew an expressive portrait of the poet as a sleek dandy in her favorite colorful neoprimitivist manner. He returned to Bolshevik Petrograd, where he embarked on a dangerous and still somewhat mysterious game with the authorities: he participated energetically in various educational endeavors promoting the new regime yet behaved provocatively, giving public readings of his promonarchist poetry and announcing, “The Bolsheviks won’t dare touch me.”
Well, they did, executing Gumilev on flimsy evidence and despite Lenin’s promise to release the poet, which he allegedly gave to Gorky, who was constantly intervening on behalf of the persecuted Russian intelligentsia. It seems that Gumilev used himself as a guinea pig to see if the Soviet regime would allow major cultural figures a certain
