The Second Pass literary site turns 1-year old today, and to celebrate proprietor John Williams has asked a number of past contributors to write about their favorite out-of-print books. Here's mine, but please visit The Second Pass to read contributions by John Davidson, Andy Miller, Ranylt Richildis, Jacob Silverman, Matt Weiland, Levi Stahl, Dan Wagstaff, Sarah Douglas, Jeff Waxman, Jon Lackman, and John Williams:
Love is the Heart of Everything: Correspondence Between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik edited by Bengt Jangfeldt (1987)
My dear and beloved kitten I kiss you terribly, terribly. All yours with all four paws, Shchen. I kiss Oska on his whiskers—this from the poet Stalin called the “Hero of the Revolution,” even ominously suggesting that “indifference to his work is a crime.” But what of indifference to his outsized love? When Vladimir Mayakovsky (the aforementioned Shchen, or “puppy”) first met Lili Brik (”kitten”) in the summer of 1915 he fell impetuously in love, and eventually into a ménage à trois with her and her husband Osip (the bewhiskered Oska). Love Is the Heart of Everything traces the highly charged relationship between these seminal figures of the Russian avant-garde through their frequent if none-too-revolutionary letters from their meeting just before the October Revolution until Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930.
Not the least bit literary, the value of the correspondence lies in its illumination of Mayakovsky’s intense personality, of his deep involvement with the Briks, and most important, of his boundless (read “codependent”) love for Lili. And it is only through these emotionally charged letters (and the accompanying doodles of kittens and sad puppies) that one can begin to completely appreciate the undisputed, if under-confident, Poet of the Revolution—or how the poet who wrote the lovelorn “A Cloud in Trousers” could be the same to later write the patriotic and adulatory “A Conversation with Comrade Lenin.” Worry miss you love you kiss you. Your Shchen.
