PEOPlE, YEARS AND
LIFE
"stored up" other things-inner agonie&--which he did not like to
talk
about. Just before his death he wrote in a poem that "love's
boat has smashed against the daily grind." This phrase was a con–
cession to the romanticism which he had so often ridiculed; in
actual fact his life was smashed against
poetry.
Addressing posterity,
he said things he did not want to say to his contemporaries: "But I
subdued myself, setting my heel on the throat of my own song."
On the surface he was all strength, health and joie de vivre.
But at times he was intolerably depressed; he was a terrible hypo–
chondriac and always carried a cake of soap in his pocket, and
whenever he shook hands with someone who was physically repul–
sive to him, he immediately went away and carefully washed his
hands. In Paris cafes he drank hot coffee through the straws sup–
plied for cold drinks, so as Dot to touch the cup with his lips. He
made fun of superstition, but he was always consulting signs and
omens. He loved gambling, flipping coins and double or quits.
In
Paris cafes there were automatic roulette wheels; you could put five
sous on red, green or yellow; if you won, you received a metal
token with which you got a cup of coffee or a glass of beer. Maya–
kovsky would stand for hours at these roulette wheels. When he left
Paris he gave Elsa Triolet hundreds of tokens. He had no use for
them, he had only wanted to guess which color would turn up. He
put only one bullet in the cylinder of the revolver-again a game of
double or quits. . . .
19
Whenever Mayakovsky talked to women, his voice changed:
usually harsh and incisive, it became soft. I read in a book by Victor
Shklovsky, "Mayakovsky went abroad. He met a woman and there
may have been a love affair. I am told that they were so like each
other and got along so well that the people in the cafes smiled ap–
preciatively when they saw them."20 Mayakovsky's poem to Ta–
tiana Yakovleva, the one mentioned by Shklovsky, has recently been
19. The method Mayakovsky chose to commit suicide in 1930-Russian
roulette--has until now never been hinted at in a Soviet publication.
20. While in Paris in 1928 Mayakovsky fell desperately in love with a
youns White Russian
~migree,
Tatiana Yakovleva. When he wished to
return to France to visit her the following yeu, he was refused a
visa
by
the authorltiell.
