How the fates of the children of Mayakovsky, Yesenin and other poets of the Silver Age developed: from memoirs about Paris to treatment in a mental hospital

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem to be people of a completely different world. The world ended, people disappeared … In fact, the First World War, the Revolution and even the Second World War, many of them survived. And many of them left descendants whose fate reflects the entire twentieth century.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya: five sons of Maria

The poetess, who became the foremother of the Silver Age poets, whose real name was Maria, was married to a Russified Frenchman and gave birth to five sons from him. Boys named Mikhail, Eugene, Vladimir, Izmail and Valery were born between 1891 and 1904. Mother gave them a lot of energy and time, but, alas, she could not be with them for long. The birth of her last son is believed to have completely undermined her health - she had a weak heart. When the baby was only a year old, she died. The eldest turned fourteen in the year of his mother's death. The year in the yard was 1905, for Russia - one of the most significant.

Mikhail graduated from a military school, during the Civil War he fought on the side of the whites, then emigrated to France. There he worked as a taxi driver for a long time. In his declining years he moved to the United States, where he committed suicide at the age of seventy-six. His brother Yevgeny remained at home and died during the blockade of Leningrad. When he was a child, his mother was sure that he would also become a poet, but this did not come true. During the blockade, his brother Vladimir also died, who also became a simple Soviet citizen after the revolution. But Ishmael became a poet. He emigrated to France and committed suicide in 1924. The fate of the youngest, Valery, who was ten at the beginning of the First World War and thirteen at the time of the revolution, is unknown.

Vladimir Mayakovsky: children from other people's fathers

Mayakovsky's two children are known: Patricia (Helen) Thompson and, allegedly, Nikita Lavinsky. After the Great Patriotic War Nikita became a sculptor, his most famous work is the monument to Ivan Susanin in Kostroma. During the war, he served as a radio operator. At the front, by the way, he married for the first time, in total he was married three times. Officially, he was considered the son of his mother's husband, also sculptor Anton Lavinsky. But his parents practiced open marriage. Nikita Antonovich's daughter claims that this led to the fact that Nikita was born from Vladimir Mayakovsky, her grandmother's lover. A DNA test has confirmed that the probability is close to 100%.

Helen Thompson was born in the United States. Her father was visiting David Burliuk, an artist and poet who lived in New York, and met Ellen Jones, a German woman with American citizenship. Their romance ended in pregnancy. Ellen's ex-husband, in a comradely manner, assigned the child to himself, depriving the girl and her mother of many problems. A few years later, Ellen managed to show her daughter Mayakovsky during a short meeting in France. Helen never saw her father again. He soon committed suicide. Helen studied to be a sociologist, but eventually became a journalist and writer. I met relatives in Mayakovsky in 1991. She lived until 2016.

Adelaide Gertsyk: the mysteries of the game

The Polish-born poet of the Silver Age became an orphan very early herself - her mother died. Translator and publisher Dmitry Zhukovsky became her chosen one. She gave birth to sons Dannil and Nikita from him. The first - eight years before the revolution, the second - four years. In the twenties, the Zhukovskys lived in the Crimea. After the capture of Crimea by the Reds, the cities were brutally cleansed of the nobles, no matter how modest they were - with greater cruelty than anywhere else. In 1924, Adelaide and her husband were arrested. Eleven-year-old Nikita was taken away by his relatives. Daniel somehow got a job on his own - he went to students in a teacher training school.

After a while, Adelaide and her husband were free. But Zhukovsky was nevertheless arrested again, exiled away with a ban on returning to Crimea, and he ended his life in Kursk, head of the laboratory of the city hospital, during the war, having lived to be seventy-five years old. Adelaide was quickly released - the investigator turned out to be a fan of her poems, but she soon died: her kidneys failed. Perhaps she chilled them in prison, or they were traumatized by the jailers.

Daniel found his father and lived with him. He became a mathematician, and also a poet and translator, as talented as the famous mother and no less famous aunt, Evgenia Gertsyk. In 1936 he was arrested for “keeping counter-revolutionary poems” (a friend of his parents' Maximilian Voloshin) and “fabrications about the life of Soviet people” (with someone he mentioned the famine in Ukraine). In 1938 he was shot by accident on his mother's birthday. Nikita Dmitrievich became a doctor, married, raised three children and lived until 1993. The book "The Mysteries of the Game: Adelaide Gertsyk and Her Children" has already been published about the relationship between boys and their mothers. The first two words are from Voloshin's poem dedicated to Adelaide.

Ilya Ehrenburg: father of a French schoolgirl

The poet was known primarily as a mouthpiece for military propaganda that inspired Soviet soldiers during the Great Patriotic War, but he began his career long before that. In general, after the revolution, he did not accept Soviet power and emigrated. He lived in turns in Germany, France and Spain. Immediately after Hitler came to power, he actively wrote texts exposing his politics. When the Francoists won in Spain, he fled to the Soviet Union. By that time, he already had clearly pro-Soviet views.

Ehrenburg was married twice. From his first marriage in France, his only known daughter, Irina, was born, the granddaughter of the polar explorer Otto Schmidt by her mother. She graduated from the Sorbonne in the thirties and, for obvious reasons, soon left for the USSR. In her new homeland she worked as a translator of French prose. She also released two of her own stories, telling the Soviet reader, for example, about how French schoolgirls lived in the twenties.

Vera Inber: mother of a French schoolgirl

A native of Odessa and one of the poetesses of the constructivist era (twenties), Inber in the Soviet Union, nevertheless, promoted as a blockade poet: the war found her already in Leningrad, and the terrible days of the blockade, of course, were reflected in her poems. She lived to be 72, born in 1890. During her long life, Inber was married three times, but gave birth only to her first husband - a daughter named Jeanne (with her father the poet lived mainly in France and Switzerland).

Jeanne was born in Paris in 1912. Her parents broke up when she was barely seven years old. The father left for emigration, the mother remained in the new Russia and married another. In the twenties, Jeanne went to her father in Paris, but later returned and entered the Literary Institute in Moscow. She finished her studies in the thirty-seventh year. Like Ehrenburg's daughter, she made her debut in Soviet literature with a story about her life in Paris. She was married three times. She died at the age of fifty, according to one version - from cirrhosis of the liver. Her only son died at the age of one.

Sergei Yesenin: four in the shops

Yesenin had three official wives - and many more actual wives and just lovers. These women bore him four children. The son of Yuri is Anna Izryadnova, a printing house worker and the poet's first permanent woman. The daughter of Tatiana and the son of Konstantin are the famous actress Zinaida Reich. Son Alexander - from the poetess Nadezhda Volpin.

Yuri became a pilot and in 1936 was arrested for plotting an assassination attempt on Stalin, along with several of his comrades. Moreover, they all served in the Far East, so the accusation is doubtful. Unless young people had some kind of theoretical conversations …

Tatyana and Konstantin were brought up instead of their father by their stepfather - director Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1939, Meirhold was arrested on charges of working for Japanese intelligence, and soon after his arrest, Reich was killed - many stab wounds -. The investigation found the men who attacked her, they were later shot. True, many do not believe that these were real criminals. Meyerhold was killed in 1940 after suffering terrible torture.

Tatyana with a small child in her arms was evicted from the apartment of her mother and stepfather. She managed to take with her and hide Meyerhold's archives. Soon the war began, and she and her child and husband were evacuated to Tashkent, where all three of them lived in a small room in a barrack. All her life Tatiana has worked as a correspondent and editor of Uzbek publications. She later managed to achieve the rehabilitation of Meyerhold. She has written several books.

Konstantin remained in Moscow, where he studied, and soon volunteered for the front. During the war, he received three wounds, including a very serious one, and two Orders of the Red Star. After the war he worked for a long time as a civil engineer. At the same time, he realized himself as a sports journalist - Konstantin Sergeevich adored football. He also helped hide Meyerhold's archives and preserve Yesenin's archives. Both Tatyana and Konstantin left behind offspring. Alexander at the age of sixteen made a promise to himself that he would never lie to anyone about anything. Even in small things and for the sake of politeness. He ended up spending part of his life in psychiatric clinics. For the first time, he was sent for treatment because of the storage of poems by Maximilian Voloshin, a friend of his parents. They were considered anti-Soviet. Alexander lived his life as a convinced dissident.

The twentieth century divided into before and after history not only literary families. Monarchs also suffered. In one of our reviews, a story about what happened to the girls of the deposed dynasties.