How was the fate of the American daughter of Vladimir Mayakovsky, who until 1991 kept the secret of her birth

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

“My two darlings Ellie. I already miss you … I kiss you all eight paws”- this is an excerpt from a letter from Vladimir Mayakovsky, addressed to his American love - Ellie Jones and their common daughter Helen Patricia Thompson. The fact that the revolutionary poet has a child overseas became known only in 1991. Until then, Helen kept a secret, fearing for her safety. When it became possible to speak openly about Mayakovsky, she visited Russia and devoted her further life to studying the biography of her father.

The Russian name of Patricia Thompson is Elena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya. At the end of her life, she preferred to call herself that way, because she finally had the legal right to declare that she was the daughter of a famous Soviet poet. Elena was born in the summer of 1926 in New York. By this time, Mayakovsky's American trip to the United States came to an end, and he was forced to return to the USSR. Overseas, he had a three-month romance with Ellie Jones, a Russian-speaking translator, German by birth, whose family first came to Russia on the orders of Catherine, and then emigrated to the United States when the revolution broke out.

At the time of Ellie's acquaintance with Vladimir, she was in a fictitious marriage with the Englishman George Jones (he helped her emigrate from Russia, first to London, then to America). After the birth of Patricia, Jones showed concern and gave the girl his last name, so she acquired American citizenship.

Patricia was convinced all her life that her mother kept the secret of her origin, fearing persecution by the NKVD. For the same reason, it seems to her, the poet himself did not mention them in his will. Patricia met her father only once, she was then only three years old, they came with her mother to Nice. Her childhood memories preserved touching moments of the meeting, the joy that the poet experienced when he saw his own daughter.

Elena Vladimirovna visited Russia in 1991. Then she communicated with interest with distant relatives, literary scholars, researchers, worked in the archives. I read the biographies of Mayakovsky and came to the idea that she was very similar to her father, she also devoted herself to enlightenment, serving people. Elena Vladimirovna was a professor, lectured on emancipation, published several textbooks, edited science fiction novels and worked for several publishing houses. All the memories told about Mayakovsky by her mother were preserved by Elena Vladimirovna as audio recordings. Based on this material, she prepared the publication Mayakovsky in Manhattan.

Elena Vladimirovna's family life was successful. Her son is a successful lawyer Roger Thompson, in many ways he looks like his famous grandfather. Elena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya lived for 90 years, after her death she bequeathed to scatter her ashes at the Novodevichy cemetery over her father's grave. She acted in a similar way on her arrival in Russia, then she brought part of the ashes of her own mother to bury it next to the grave of the Russian poet.

Roger hopes that he will have enough time to eventually publish a book about his mother, the name for her already exists - "Daughter". This word is the only mention of Elena in Mayakovsky's diaries. Once Elena Vladimirovna let slip that Lilya Brik did everything possible to destroy any evidence of American history. But, leafing through the archives, she managed to find a surviving sheet in one of the diaries, on which only this word was written.

A new romance that replaced Ellie Jones began with the poet Tatyana Yakovleva, Russian emigrant and cold star Mayakovsky.